I wanted a place for all of my longer mastodon rants that I'm proud of.. Here it is. I'll be going through and adding stuff as time allows. Called it nightsongs. Because a friend once joked that it was no accident that my fursona is an owl because. I do my best work late at night. There is no grander vision no manifesto. You might get notes on the new Muffin Recipe, I'm developing, in addition to the mastodon rants
I am thirty five years old, I have been a writer since I was nineteen. I was a bit of a late bloomer there owing to a birth defect that messed up my hands, amongst many other thing. I have wanted to be a writer since my earliest childhood memories, but my ability to practice the craft was starkly limited before dictation software got good.
The history of dictation software goes back to 1992, a little company called Visioneer, which originally made scanners, purportedly made the first natural language processing software. the history of this branch of technology, is a bit murky however. The first dictation product that most people heard about was Dragon Dictate. Which appeared and either 1990 or 1992 depending on which source you trust. What is undisputed however is the fact that in 1992 a copy of Dragon Dictate would run you and astounding nine thousand dollars. Which according to the internet would be nearly twenty thousand today. This price would come down, so dramatically in fact That in 2002 my parents were able to buy the competing product something from ibm called viavoice 98 on clearance for my 13th birthday.
The bad thing about viavoice 98 was it required Windows 98, and a pretty beastly computer for the time in order to function correctly. So two years later we were petitioning the school to buy a new computer and and upgrade to the then latest dragon naturally speaking. Given that I was a homeschooled student at the time. Let's just say that the school district was very skeptical of this request.
I needed something more than tools however, that is I needed someone or a community of someone to teach me how to write. There were early attempts of course, I am almost sure some of my early attempts at fanfiction survive to this day. But they are some of the worst written most ungrammatical pieces grace the hallowed halls of the internet. I was more than once accused of being far younger than I was, and even banned from multiple sites. Moderators treated my assertion that I was sixteen with great incredulity upon reading my submissions.
It wasn't until I was nineteen, had regular access to the software, and through the efforts of Dr. Gherkin, and Dr. Murphy. That I was able to spread my wings as a writer, and discover a love for the genre of creative nonfiction. Which I write in most often. Just as this was starting to happen, the time of my life that I refer to as the dark years began. Grief, undiagnosed mental illness and the almost Sisyphean task of completing a college degree with a serious disability conspired to make sure, that I would almost never write for an audience for about a decade. It wasn't until I was 29 that my first published work appeared. So in a way I have only been a writer for six years. Though the desire has been a constant throughout my life, and I have never stopped reaching for that goal.
Another through line in my life, or at least my life since I was a senior in high school has been the presence of John Green in my internet feeds. I followed the original Brotherhood 2.0 with great interest. I was even a member of Your Pants for and all too brief time. Although I don't think I was ever accused of lying about my age and actually being eleven years old on that forum. I have always found the Green brothers to be two of the most erudite internet personalities in existence. But until yesterday I had never read one of John Greene's books to completion.
I have never enjoyed the young adult genre, Even when I was in the target demographic except one book I accidentally picked up when I was Legitimately eleven years old about two teenagers surviving a car crash in a blizzard. I can never remember the title. And I expect that the teacher's aide assigned to read it to me was carefully editing out certain plot elements.
These plot elements so carefully edited out in my youth or what drive me nuts about the young adult genre in general. As a person somewhere on the asexual spectrum, who is also physically disabled I find that sex and romance just don't work for me like the authors describe. I have found better romance for free on kink forums, then spending my precious audible credits or even worse cash on some new york times bestseller.
I was dimly aware the john green had published yet another book in 2021. Naively I assumed it was yet another love story with a side of honest portrayal of illness thrown in. Good for him I thought someone living their best life and sharing the love with the world. Wonderful, but my Para social relationship with the author is nowhere near strong enough to compel me to endure another young adult novel.
Yesterday night I found myself in the middle of a rare confluence where I had a spare audible credit and nothing to do with it. Something about a video one of the Green's had done two weeks ago, ironically enough about Parasocial relationships, made me want to look both of the brothers up and hear at least the samples of what they'd been up to recently. Finding out that john green had written a book of creative nonfiction was a jolt to the system. This is after all my genre, the thing I am trying to become best at. Perhaps I will one day be as good as Sedaris, but with middle age rapidly approaching. That is beginning to resemble a dream, rather than an ambition. I had to read it if only to see how fiction writer of formidable skill, approaches this thing that I love beyond words.
Emotions can also be confluent, that is to say they can mix and combine into rare and even unique forms that are unrecognizable unless you have felt them before. The Anthropocene Reviewed evoked such a confluence in me. It is no wonder john green is a bestselling author, for he weaves together history, current events and memoir so effortlessly that you barely see the seams in the garment. I was at once awestruck, inspired, and at the same time filled with a wistful regret. For all the lost years I have had in my own craft. For this is an essayist at the peak of his powers.
The author's curiosity about the world and compassion for all its inhabitants leak through every page.. The labyrinthine structure of each chapter is nothing short of marvelous. the title of each chapter is just the barest hint of the journey, through time and space the author we'll lead you on. And you don't quite know how he gets from canadian geese, to urban population statistics through the history of lawns and then right back to the goose in under ten minutes of talk time. After having been on one of these circuitous journeys You will never look at the subject under review in the same way again.
Writing as a person with disability, or multiple disabilities if you want to be technical has never been easy. Even with dictation software you have to fight it. everyone is aware of the phenomenon of siri or google getting things wrong even though you clearly spoke the words slowly like you were supposed to. Imagine that every day, in fact imagine having to fight that every minute. I change my sentence structure, simplifying here, complexifying there. All to suit the damned dictation software. my work almost always comes out mangled, never having the rhythm or structure that I envision. Sometimes I am able to beat into submission, as the technology gets better and I become older and more patient, it feels like this is easier.
Visioneer Dragon, and all the rest are now part of Microsoft's artificial intelligence division. One of the leading culprits in burning the planet down. Even independently produced dictation software, which i get for free now must use intellectual property which this ethically dubious entity was instrumental in creating. So on top of everything I deal with as a writer. As a human being I have to worry whether it is ethical for me to have a voice at all.
I need a hefty dose of inspiration, to even try to accommodate these challenges. It would be easy for me just to give up. To withdraw into the silence as I did during those dark times I mentioned. To stay in the fight one must be nourished, and reminded of why one chose this nearly unattainable craft. For providing that nourishment I give The Anthropocene Reviewed five stars.
It's quite amazing to me just how easily one's life could've been completely different..
See when i was in my first wave of identity questioning, late teenage early college. and exploring witchcraft/the occult. I read a few books by Silver Ravenwolf..
Wiccans/Occult practitioners more generally are already cringing/cursing at their screens here.
Ravenwolf is problematic because of her antichristian attitudes among other things,
And i just didn't vibe with it. So i put Witchcraft/Neopagenism aside as not for me.
But it was still a fruitful path, because it lead to me discovering both progressive christian theology, and folk piety/ older pre reformation attitudes toward things like ghosts etc.
This merger of rationality with deep mysticism inside the progressive catholic tradition is central to my identity now . The core around which my sense of self is built one might say.
Had i read Deborah Lipp as an introduction to the occult i think my spiritual journey would've been radically different. And hence my identity
Weird thing is I can't even imagine. The person that would've been.. Even though i know the way Lipp puts things would've called to my past self in a profound way.
It is no secret, on this site at least that i have multiple serious disabilities. When i have to disclose that fact to outsiders i often get a strange reaction, they are taken aback by the level of "success". I have, apparently not many people in my position live in the "community" by themselves, occasionally, work a job, and enjoy strong bonds to people outside of intimidate family.
Let's take a pause to consider that. What outsiders (medical professionals, social workers, councilors, etc) consider a disabled person who manages to achieve basic human needs, not only a success but a success so great that i've been called an "inspiration" . I am not a success by my own criteria, yet. I don't feel that my life is particularly inspirational. Nonetheless I made a bet with the universe, that if one more person called me an inspiration or asked what my secret was. I would write it down. Turns out one really shouldn't make bets with the universe, especially not after dark. you will lose.
My "Secret" is that over time I've distilled my knowledge of how to human with a disability, into sayings that i repeat to myself, currently there are 12, maybe 14 depending on how you count. But i can't just say "Give the mouse her cookie" or "The universe loves you" without actually explaining in detail what those sayings mean, and pretty soon you have an outline for yet another book length writing project of approximately 20,000 words. See what i mean about bets with the universe. That's rule 11. By the way we'll get to that one later.
For now i want to address Saying 4
I have bipolar, which is at it's core a defect in how the brain processes and works with with certain chemicals primarily Dopamine. The media stereotypes would have you believe, we're all flighty maniac artist types with no self control whatsoever. But Mania is only one presentation of it. My baseline without medication is a severe depression that never completely goes away, even on good days.
When it first hit in college i spent weeks, only making it to class sporadically, and only really getting out of bed in order to eat. My GPA went from a 3.8 to a 1.7 over the course of two semesters. It took 7 years to get a diagnosis and another 18 months to find the right medications. Meanwhile i had to figure out how to not get booted from college and end up with a degree for my efforts. Thus was born my fourth saying. Give the mouse her cookie
If you give a mouse a cookie is a satirical childrens book, about a boy who gives a mouse a cookie, and then ends up saying yes to incresingly absurd requests from the mouse. That he would've never granted had the mouse asked up front. On those days that i was so depressed that i couldn't get out of bed, or in so much pain from the Cerbral Palsy that it felt like i couldn't. I found that starting with some small task, just to get moving would help. For example
On it goes, Even though my intent was to go stright back to bed, once meds were taken. By Giving the mouse her cookie. I ended up getting dressed and out of the house. Notice however that i didn't say to myself. "You have a lot of work to do.. It's time to get up". I set out one very simple very obtainable goal, and built from there. If I was feeling worse i could've taken my pills with water and had done with it. The key to this saying is that while doing the small you are always looking for the next larger thing.
Some readers might recognize paralells of this princpal in a saying in addiction recovery "Do the next right thing", or you might be singing that song from Frozen 2. This is an accurate paralell to draw, at least partially.
Do the Next Right Thing has a hidden value judgement within it however. And this value judgement proves to be it's undoing, in a disabilty/chronic health problems context. What is right and who decides. When we use such charged words as our focus we often set our eyes on unobtainable goals, even if the reason the thing you want is unobtainable due to a temporary circumstance. When we do not attain what we belive we should, this causes feelings of failure. Which is often the worst thing to have to process when you regularlly have doors slamed in your face; or have to watch your peers thrive whilst you struggle.
This is not to say "Don't have dreams" in fact Saying 8 "Dreams are like cows" is all about how long term goals work. Remove the value judgement and just do what inspires you to move. If all you end up doing with your day is listen to your favorite song on repeat, then at least you've made for yourself a little comfort and joy.
In the moment of pain, when our world caves in. Find the one thing that motivates you to action in the moment, and let action beget action. I find that if one does that. I find myself in a wider world, under better stars.
I just had to use GenAI to 'code something' because search sucks.. But that isn't the interesting part. See i spent like an hour polishing the turd it gave me... the original output had a lot of deprecated api usage, and php warnings in it.. Which under my current set up warnings are treated as errors because they output to stderr. Which Nginx doesn't like... Anyway. 45-60 minutes polishing, and it's still not very performant code.. I'll probably pound on it some tomorrow, add caching or something not the point.
AI, or the large dataset statistical modeling sort of "AI" that's currently being hyped will never replace human intellectual labor because in order to use the output it generates a human who knows what they're doing still must be involved somewhere in the pipeline.. When humans aren't the results can be subpar at best and disastrous at worst.
Is the "market" aware of this yet, i don't think so.. But AI seems more and more like a bubble waiting to burst the more i work with it//