thecurioustale - Tumblr blog

[thecurioustale]

I remember this in the news. Very cool to read an account from someone who was on the inside.

I think to myself sometimes just how much progress we have made in the 21st century on sex-related issues. It doesn't get talked about often because right now the fascist tide is actively eroding rights and that gets all the attention, but I do think about all the progress. The gains are massive and the societal effects transformative, opening the door to a much wider discourse about sexual identity (including gender identity). Things are so different now from when I was a kid. There are legal adults today who never knew a world without marriage equality.

These rights are new, and they are more fragile than I think most people realize. Today's US Supreme Court would not have legalized same-sex marriage, and if anything would explicitly outlaw it. The late 2010s have the potential to be a long-term high-water mark in sexual equality, rather than a checkpoint in a broader societal ascent toward liberty and justice. Complacency can never be acceptable; don't you forget it.

Twenty years ago, February 15th, 2004, I got married for the first time.

It was twenty years earlier than I ever expected to.

To celebrate/comemorate the date, I'm sitting down to write out everything I remember as I remember it. No checking all the pictures I took or all the times I've written about this before. I'm not going to turn to my husband (of twenty years, how the f'ing hell) to remember a detail for me.

This is not a 100% accurate recounting of that first wild weekend in San Francisco. But it -is- a 100% accurate recounting of how I remember it today, twenty years after the fact.

Join me below, if you would.

2004 was an election year, and much like conservatives are whipping up anti-trans hysteria and anti-trans bills and propositions to drive out the vote today, in 2004 it was all anti-gay stuff. Specifically, preventing the evil scourge of same-sex marriage from destroying everything good and decent in the world.

Enter Gavin Newstrom. At the time, he was the newly elected mayor of San Francisco. Despite living next door to the city all my life, I hadn’t even heard of the man until Valentines Day 2004 when he announced that gay marriage was legal in San Francisco and started marrying people at city hall.

It was a political stunt. It was very obviously a political stunt. That shit was illegal, after all. But it was a very sweet political stunt. I still remember the front page photo of two ancient women hugging each other forehead to forehead and crying happy tears.

But it was only going to last for as long as it took for the California legal system to come in and make them knock it off.

The next day, we’re on the phone with an acquaintance, and she casually mentions that she’s surprised the two of us aren’t up at San Francisco getting married with everyone else.

“Everyone else?” Goes I, “I thought they would’ve shut that down already?”

“Oh no!” goes she, “The courts aren’t open until Tuesday. Presidents Day on Monday and all. They’re doing them all weekend long!”

We didn’t know because social media wasn’t a thing yet. I only knew as much about it as I’d read on CNN, and most of the blogs I was following were more focused on what bullshit President George W Bush was up to that day.

"Well shit", me and my man go, "do you wanna?" I mean, it’s a political stunt, it wont really mean anything, but we’re not going to get another chance like this for at least 20 years. Why not?

The next day, Sunday, we get up early. We drive north to the southern-most BART station. We load onto Bay Area Rapid Transit, and rattle back and forth all the way to the San Francisco City Hall stop.

We had slightly miscalculated.

Apparently, demand for marriages was far outstripping the staff they had on hand to process them. Who knew. Everyone who’d gotten turned away Saturday had been given tickets with times to show up Sunday to get their marriages done. My babe and I, we could either wait to see if there was a space that opened up, or come back the next day, Monday.

“Isn’t City Hall closed on Monday?” I asked. “It’s a holiday”

“Oh sure,” they reply, “but people are allowed to volunteer their time to come in and work on stuff anyways. And we have a lot of people who want to volunteer their time to have the marriage licensing offices open tomorrow.”

“Oh cool,” we go, “Backup.”

“Make sure you’re here if you do,” they say, “because the California Supreme Court is back in session Tuesday, and will be reviewing the motion that got filed to shut us down.”

And all this shit is super not-legal, so they’ll totally be shutting us down goes unsaid.

00000

We don’t get in Saturday. We wind up hanging out most of the day, though.

It’s… incredible. I can say, without hyperbole, that I have never experienced so much concentrated joy and happiness and celebration of others’ joy and happiness in all my life before or since. My face literally ached from grinning. Every other minute, a new couple was coming out of City Hall, waving their paperwork to the crowd and cheering and leaping and skipping. Two glorious Latina women in full Mariachi band outfits came out, one in the arms of another. A pair of Jewish boys with their families and Rabbi. One couple managed to get a Just Married convertible arranged complete with tin-cans tied to the bumper to drive off in. More than once I was giving some rice to throw at whoever was coming out next.

At some point in the mid-afternoon, there was a sudden wave of extra cheering from the several hundred of us gathered at the steps, even though no one was coming out. There was a group going up the steps to head inside, with some generic black-haired shiny guy at the front. My not-yet-husband nudged me, “That’s Newsom.” He said, because he knew I was hopeless about matching names and people.

Ooooooh, I go. That explains it. Then I joined in the cheers. He waved and ducked inside.

So dusk is starting to fall. It’s February, so it’s only six or so, but it’s getting dark.

“Should we just try getting in line for tomorrow -now-?” we ask.

“Yeah, I’m afraid that’s not going to be possible.” One of the volunteers tells us. “We’re not allowed to have people hang out overnight like this unless there are facilities for them and security. We’d need Porta-Poties for a thousand people and police patrols and the whole lot, and no one had time to get all that organized. Your best bet is to get home, sleep, and then catch the first BART train up at 5am and keep your fingers crossed.

Monday is the last day to do this, after all.

00000

So we go home. We crash out early. We wake up at 4:00. We drive an hour to hit the BART station. We get the first train up. We arrive at City Hall at 6:30AM.

The line stretches around the entirety of San Francisco City Hall. You could toss a can of Coke from the end of the line to the people who’re up to be first through the doors and not have to worry about cracking it open after.

“Uh.” We go. “What the fuck is -this-?”

So.

Remember why they weren’t going to be able to have people hang out overnight?

Turns out, enough SF cops were willing to volunteer unpaid time to do patrols to cover security. And some anonymous person delivered over a dozen Porta-Poties that’d gotten dropped off around 8 the night before.

It’s 6:30 am, there are almost a thousand people in front of us in line to get this literal once in a lifetime marriage, the last chance we expect to have for at least 15 more years (it was 2004, gay rights were getting shoved back on every front. It was not looking good. We were just happy we lived in California were we at least weren’t likely to loose job protections any time soon.).

Then it starts to rain.

We had not dressed for rain.

00000

Here is how the next six hours go.

We’re in line. Once the doors open at 7am, it will creep forward at a slow crawl. It’s around 7 when someone shows up with garbage bags for everyone. Cut holes for the head and arms and you’ve got a makeshift raincoat! So you’ve got hundreds of gays and lesbians decked out in the nicest shit they could get on short notice wearing trashbags over it.

Everyone is so happy.

Everyone is so nervous/scared/frantic that we wont be able to get through the doors before they close for the day.

People online start making delivery orders.

Coffee and bagels are ordered in bulk and delivered to City Hall for whoever needs it. We get pizza. We get roses. Random people come by who just want to give hugs to people in line because they’re just so happy for us. The tour busses make detours to go past the lines. Chinese tourists lean out with their cameras and shout GOOD LUCK while car horns honk.

A single sad man holding a Bible tries to talk people out of doing this, tells us all we’re sinning and to please don’t. He gives up after an hour. A nun replaces him with a small sign about how this is against God’s will. She leaves after it disintegrates in the rain.

The day before, when it was sunny, there had been a lot of protestors. Including a large Muslim group with their signs about how “Not even DOGS do such things!” Which… Yes they do.

A lot of snide words are said (by me) about how the fact that we’re willing to come out in the rain to do this while they’re not willing to come out in the rain to protest it proves who actually gives an actual shit about the topic.

Time passes. I measure it based on which side of City Hall we’re on. The doors face East. We start on Northside. Coffee and trashbags are delivered when we’re on the North Side. Pizza first starts showing up when we’re on Westside, which is also where I see Bible Man and Nun. Roses are delivered on Southside. And so forth.

00000

We have Line Neighbors.

Ahead of us are a gay couple a decade or two older than us. They’ve been together for eight years. The older one is a school teacher. He has his coat collar up and turns away from any news cameras that come near while we reposition ourselves between the lenses and him. He’s worried about the parents of one of his students seeing him on the news and getting him fired. The younger one will step away to get interviewed on his own later on. They drove down for the weekend once they heard what was going on. They’d started around the same time we did, coming from the Northeast, and are parked in a nearby garage.

The most perky energetic joyful woman I’ve ever met shows up right after we turned the corner to Southside to tackle the younger of the two into a hug. She’s their local friend who’d just gotten their message about what they’re doing and she will NOT be missing this. She is -so- happy for them. Her friends cry on her shoulders at her unconditional joy.

Behind us are a lesbian couple who’d been up in San Francisco to celebrate their 12th anniversary together. “We met here Valentines Day weekend! We live down in San Diego, now, but we like to come up for the weekend because it’s our first love city.”

“Then they announced -this-,” the other one says, “and we can’t leave until we get married. I called work Sunday and told them I calling in sick until Wednesday.”

“I told them why,” her partner says, “I don’t care if they want to give me trouble for it. This is worth it. Fuck them.”

My husband-to-be and I look at each other. We’ve been together for not even two years at this point. Less than two years. Is it right for us to be here? We’re potentially taking a spot from another couple that’d been together longer, who needed it more, who deserved it more.”

“Don’t you fucking dare.” Says the 40-something gay couple in front of us.

“This is as much for you as it is for us!” says the lesbian couple who’ve been together for over a decade behind us.

“You kids are too cute together,” says the gay couple’s friend. “you -have- to. Someday -you’re- going to be the old gay couple that’s been together for years and years, and you deserve to have been married by then.”

We stay in line.

It’s while we’re on the Southside of City Hall, just about to turn the corner to Eastside at long last that we pick up our own companions. A white woman who reminds me an awful lot of my aunt with a four year old black boy riding on her shoulders. “Can we say we’re with you? His uncles are already inside and they’re not letting anyone in who isn’t with a couple right there.” “Of course!” we say.

The kid is so very confused about what all the big deal is, but there’s free pizza and the busses keep driving by and honking, so he’s having a great time.

We pass by a statue of Lincoln with ‘Marriage for All!’ and "Gay Rights are Human Rights!" flags tucked in the crooks of his arms and hanging off his hat.

It’s about noon, noon-thirty when we finally make it through the doors and out of the rain.

They’ve promised that anyone who’s inside when the doors shut will get married. We made it. We’re safe.

We still have a -long- way to go.

00000

They’re trying to fit as many people into City Hall as possible. Partially to get people out of the rain, mostly to get as many people indoors as possible. The line now stretches down into the basement and up side stairs and through hallways I’m not entirely sure the public should ever be given access to. We crawl along slowly but surely.

It’s after we’ve gone through the low-ceiling basement hallways past offices and storage and back up another set of staircases and are going through a back hallway of low-ranked functionary offices that someone comes along handing out the paperwork. “It’s an hour or so until you hit the office, but take the time to fill these out so you don’t have to do it there!”

We spend our time filling out the paperwork against walls, against backs, on stone floors, on books.

We enter one of the public areas, filled with displays and photos of City Hall Demonstrations of years past.

I take pictures of the big black and white photo of the Abraham Lincoln statue holding banners and signs against segregation and for civil rights.

The four year old boy we helped get inside runs past us around this time, chased by a blond haired girl about his own age, both perused by an exhausted looking teenager helplessly begging them to stop running.

Everyone is wet and exhausted and vibrating with anticipation and the building-wide aura of happiness that infuses everything.

The line goes into the marriage office. A dozen people are at the desk, shoulder to shoulder, far more than it was built to have working it at once.

A Sister of Perpetual Indulgence is directing people to city officials the moment they open up. She’s done up in her nun getup with all her makeup on and her beard is fluffed and be-glittered and on point. “Oh, I was here yesterday getting married myself, but today I’m acting as your guide. Number 4 sweeties, and -Congradulatiooooons!-“

The guy behind the counter has been there since six. It’s now 1:30. He’s still giddy with joy. He counts our money. He takes our paperwork, reviews it, stamps it, sends off the parts he needs to, and hands the rest back to us. “Alright, go to the Rotunda, they’ll direct you to someone who’ll do the ceremony. Then, if you want the certificate, they’ll direct you to -that- line.” “Can’t you just mail it to us?” “Normally, yeah, but the moment the courts shut us down, we’re not going to be allowed to.”

We take our paperwork and join the line to the Rotunda.

If you’ve seen James Bond: A View to a Kill, you’ve seen the San Francisco City Hall Rotunda. There are literally a dozen spots set up along the balconies that overlook the open area where marriage officials and witnesses are gathered and are just processing people through as fast as they can.

That’s for the people who didn’t bring their own wedding officials.

There’s a Catholic-adjacent couple there who seem to have brought their entire families -and- the priest on the main steps. They’re doing the whole damn thing. There’s at least one more Rabbi at work, I can’t remember what else. Just that there was a -lot-.

We get directed to the second story, northside. The San Francisco City Treasurer is one of our two witnesses. Our marriage officient is some other elected official I cannot remember for the life of me (and I'm only writing down what I can actively remember, so I can't turn to my husband next to me and ask, but he'll have remembered because that's what he does.)

I have a wilting lily flower tucked into my shirt pocket. My pants have water stains up to the knees. My hair is still wet from the rain, I am blubbering, and I can’t get the ring on my husband’s finger. The picture is a treat, I tell you.

There really isn’t a word for the mix of emotions I had at that time. Complete disbelief that this was reality and was happening. Relief that we’d made it. Awe at how many dozens of people had personally cheered for us along the way and the hundreds to thousands who’d cheered for us generally.

Then we're married.

Then we get in line to get our license.

It’s another hour. This time, the line goes through the higher stories. Then snakes around and goes past the doorway to the mayor’s office.

Mayor Newsom is not in today. And will be having trouble getting into his office on Tuesday because of the absolute barricade of letters and flowers and folded up notes and stuffed animals and City Hall maps with black marked “THANK YOU!”s that have been piled up against it.

We make it to the marriage records office.

I take a picture of my now husband standing in front of a case of the marriage records for 1902-1912. Numerous kids are curled up in corners sleeping. My own memory is spotty. I just know we got the papers, and then we’re done with lines. We get out, we head to the front entrance, and we walk out onto the City Hall steps.

It's almost 3PM.

00000

There are cheers, there’s rice thrown at us, there are hundreds of people celebrating us with unconditional love and joy and I had never before felt the goodness that exists in humanity to such an extent. It’s no longer raining, just a light sprinkle, but there are still no protestors. There’s barely even any news vans.

We make our way through the gauntlet, we get hands shaked, people with signs reading ”Congratulations!” jump up and down for us. We hit the sidewalks, and we begin to limp our way back to the BART station.

I’m at the BART station, we’re waiting for our train back south, and I’m sitting on the ground leaning against a pillar and in danger of falling asleep when a nondescript young man stops in front of me and shuffles his feet nervously. “Hey. I just- I saw you guys, down at City Hall, and I just… I’m so happy for you. I’m so proud of what you could do. I’m- I’m just really glad, glad you could get to do this.”

He shakes my hand, clasps it with both of his and shakes it. I thank him and he smiles and then hurries away as fast as he can without running.

Our train arrives and the trip south passes in a semilucid blur.

We get back to our car and climb in.

It’s 4:30 and we are starving.

There’s a Carls Jr near the station that we stop off at and have our first official meal as a married couple. We sit by the window and watch people walking past and pick out others who are returning from San Francisco. We're all easy to pick out, what with the combination of giddiness and water damage.

We get home about 6-7. We take the dog out for a good long walk after being left alone for two days in a row. We shower. We bundle ourselves up. We bury ourselves in blankets and curl up and just sort of sit adrift in the surrealness of what we’d just done.

We wake up the next day, Tuesday, to read that the California State Supreme Court has rejected the petition to shut down the San Francisco weddings because the paperwork had a misplaced comma that made the meaning of one phrase unclear.

The State Supreme Court would proceed to play similar bureaucratic tricks to drag the process out for nearly a full month before they have nothing left and finally shut down Mayor Newsom’s marriages.

My parents had been out of state at the time at a convention. They were flying into SFO about the same moment we were walking out of City Hall. I apologized to them later for not waiting and my mom all but shook me by the shoulders. “No! No one knew that they’d go on for so long! You did what you needed to do! I’ll just be there for the next one!”

00000

It was just a piece of paper. Legally, it didn’t even hold any weight thirty days later. My philosophy at the time was “marriage really isn’t that important, aside from the legal benefits. It’s just confirming what you already have.”

But maybe it’s just societal weight, or ingrained culture, or something, but it was different after. The way I described it at the time, and I’ve never really come up with a better metaphor is, “It’s like we were both holding onto each other in the middle of the ocean in the middle of a storm. We were keeping each other above water, we were each other’s support. But then we got this piece of paper. And it was like the ground rose up to meet our feet. We were still in an ocean, still in the middle of a storm, but there was a solid foundation beneath our feet. We still supported each other, but there was this other thing that was also keeping our heads above the water.

It was different. It was better. It made things more solid and real.

I am forever grateful for all the forces and all the people who came together to make it possible. It’s been twenty years and we’re still together and still married.

We did a domestic partnership a year later to get the legal paperwork. We’d done a private ceremony with proper rings (not just ones grabbed out of the husband’s collection hours before) before then. And in 2008, we did a legal marriage again.

Rushed. In a hurry. Because there was Proposition 13 to be voted on which would make them all illegal again if it passed.

It did, but we were already married at that point, and they couldn’t negate it that time.

Another few years after that, the Supreme Court finally threw up their hands and said "Fine! It's been legal in places and nothing's caught on fire or been devoured by locusts. It's legal everywhere. Shut up about it!"

And that was that.

00000

When I was in highschool, in the late 90s, I didn’t expect to see legal gay marriage until I was in my 50s. I just couldn’t see how the American public as it was would ever be okay with it.

I never expected to be getting married within five years. I never expected it to be legal nationwide before I’d barely started by 30s. I never thought I’d be in my 40s and it’d be such a non-issue that the conservative rabble rousers would’ve had to move onto other wedge issues altogether.

I never thought that I could introduce another man as my husband and absolutely no one involved would so much as blink.

I never thought I’d live in this world.

And it’s twenty years later today. I wonder how our line buddies are doing. Those babies who were running around the wide open rooms playing tag will have graduated college by now. The kids whose parents the one line-buddy was worried would see him are probably married too now. Some of them to others of the same gender.

I don’t have some greater message to make with all this. Other then, culture can shift suddenly in ways you can’t predict. For good or ill. Mainly this is just me remembering the craziest fucking 36 hours of my life twenty years after the fact and sharing them with all of you.

The future we’re resigned to doesn’t have to be the one we live in. Society can shift faster than you think. The unimaginable of twenty years ago is the baseline reality of today.

And always remember that the people who want to get married will show up by the thousands in rain that none of those who’re against it will brave.

[thecurioustale]

Life imitates art imitates life.

HILDA

Homage to the 50’s pinup Hilda with my beautiful friend María, who is damn proud of her body and is never scared to show it.

©2021laurabfernández

[thecurioustale]

<trying to practice the virtue of using asks more>

For me, the biggest barrier to writing more is achieving consistency, that is, being able to decide "I will write today" rather than waiting for the muse to show up and then getting a few days or a few weeks of really good text. It's not as bad as it used to be, but I'm coming to terms with the fact that this is going to be a lifelong struggle that I slowly get better at year-by-year, and there's no silver bullet that will make it happen all at once.

From your comments, it seems like you're quite good at writing consistently, whether or not The Noumenal Spirit of the Word takes possession of your hands on any given day. Is this a talent of yours, or did you similarly have to fight for it? And do you have any particular insights about that process, or how to make progress with it?

This is a great question! And it's one that I often see people asking, so I think this is a pretty widespread problem that people have.

Is this a talent of yours, or did you similarly have to fight for it?

It's both, and I will get to that. First, I will say up front that I am not well-qualified to advise people on writing consistently, because I am not, in fact, a consistent writer in the sense that most people usually mean it. While it's true that I am both a prolific writer and that I write almost every day, I am not generally a consistent writer and most of my writing isn't manuscript text for my fiction; it's less-valuable stuff (usually reaction commentary). I routinely go for days and sometimes weeks without working on either of my two big novels. In the big picture, this is one of the main reasons why I have been working on those novels for almost a decade with no end in sight.

But here is my answer anyway. I'm going to cover a few different topics:

Writing consistently at all

Writing consistently over a long period of time

Writing high-value creative work consistently

Where high-value refers to "the work that's most important to you / that you most want to be doing."

Also, this essay is full of "you" pronouns. Usually these are directed at a generic "for the sake conversation" you; that's just how I write. If I'm talking to togglesbloggle specifically, I'll make a note of it.

1. Writing Consistently at All

I absolutely can write consistently. I do it for freelance work regularly. And back in the mid-2010s when I was doing weekly features on my website, I regularly wrote fiction on pain of my self-imposed external deadline. For as long as those efforts lasted, I almost never missed an installment of The Great Galavar or Empire on Ice. I got some really got work done that way, but more importantly I proved that it's something I am capable of doing. Because it's not a given that a person actually is capable of that.

I do think most people are capable of forcing themselves to write in this way, at least for a time. And I would challenge anyone who wants to write more consistently to undertake some kind of regularly-scheduled writing obligation, if they have never done so previously or have not done so recently. And I mean really do it: Make it happen no matter what it costs you. It's not for the sake of the content. The content doesn't matter; treat that like icing. The purpose is to complete a proof-of-concept exercise. Because if you can't do this on demand, then there probably isn't much point in trying to develop a more consistent writing output; you're not likely to succeed. Either you are psychologically not capable of it, or you are not taking it seriously enough. And I don't say that flippantly; I really don't. But this is one of those things you can't make excuses for not doing: If you set out to do it, you either have to succeed or face the fact that you haven't got the stuff. If you consider yourself an artist, it might be one of the most important commitments you ever undertake.

Write something creative that is ideally but not necessarily in the neighborhood of what you want to be writing. (You don't have to touch your magnum opus; you can, but you don't have to. You can tackle something else, or even invent something new for this occasion.)

I think it would be helpful to undertake something with predetermined parameters (e.g., an episode of The Great Galavar) so that you're not starting from scratch each week. For example, writing one poem each week. (Or each day, or whatever works for you.) Or writing one character dossier each week. Or one location profile. Or one piece of flash fiction. What I mean when I say "predetermined parameters" is that you should know in advance what format or medium or thing you're going to be writing, if not the actual contents.

Write it on a periodic schedule (e.g. weekly; I think weekly and daily are the best options; if daily you can do "weekdays only" or "every day"). Do it for a couple of months, or better yet a whole year, and in that time never miss an installment unless you have a damn good reason. Write your obligations even if you have to write a total dud now and then that isn't satisfying in any way. It's not about the content; it's about the discipline.

Where does this discipline come from? That's the $64,000 question. Ultimately, if the discipline is internal, it must come from one (or both) of two sources: your dignity and your determination. And determination is a fair-weather friend; if you struggle with consistency it probably isn't wise to rely on determination. So, really, it comes down to dignity, I think. It comes down to understanding that your performance in this undertaking will say something about who you are, and your character and capability as a person, and your power and integrity as an artist. And you might not like what your performance says. Dignity, then—in its positive mode i.e. honor, and in its negative mode i.e. fear. Let your motto be: Dignity obliges.

In a less general sense, there are many particular things you can do to write more consistently. Your mileage will vary with each aid. Some common techniques include:

Do it first thing in the morning.

Do it at a specific and consistent time in the day.

Do it in a specific and consistent place.

Do it with specific and consistent environmental prompts, like turning on a favorite light or pouring yourself a favorite beverage. Ideally, limit these prompts elsewhere in your daily life.

Do it right after doing something else that you know often helps, e.g. eating, working out, showering.

On that point, one thing I found helpful in the year that I was doing this was to let myself think about that week's installments during my walks. I would take a leisure walk most days, and if the deadline was coming up in the next day or two and I didn't already know what I would be writing, I would sometimes think about it as I walked. That was very, very helpful. Also, I didn't have my notepad with me, or a phone. I had to remember anything that I came up with, which, up to a certain point, I also find very helpful, because storing a backlog of compelling ideas is a form of excitement and excitement is a power-up.

Something else that is very helpful, albeit often not viable, is to power your consistent writing by putting your nervous energy in front of it. Most of the writing that I do is "throwaway" writing. Today I listened to some of the oral arguments at the Supreme Court about Trump's presidential immunity case, and I felt the compulsion to respond to that, so I wrote a whole essay about it. I also wrote a short commentary on the FCC's ruling to restore net neutrality. (Yay!) These compulsive writings today happened to occur on Facebook, and what I've gotten good at doing these days is that, once I'm finished writing whatever I am compelled to write, I'll usually step back and say "Okay, I got it out of my system, but this isn't really appropriate to post here." And then I'll discard it or tuck it away somewhere.

I call it "throwaway" writing because it doesn't serve any purpose once it's finished. But it is possible, sometimes, to change that. I haven't officially announced this yet, but I actually wrote a book this year—in just two-and-a-half months, actually. (It's one reason I haven't been super active on Tumblr lately.) It's a book of essays, and the way I wrote it was by changing my behavior so that my compulsive writing "itch" each day was in response to prompts that could become essays in the book. I aimed to write three essays a day, every day, and while 81 essays in 10 weeks actually only averages out to a little better than one essay per day, that was still good enough for me to break 70,000 words in just 10 weeks and finish the book. (This book is completely done, by the way, and will be published in a couple of weeks. I'll be making an official announcement when it comes out.) For the first month-and-a-half, I tried never to let a day pass without writing at least one essay. There were no "days off." If it was clear I wasn't going to hit three essays, I would strive for just one. And I would only let myself off the hook for that one essay if I was too tired to think clearly, or if I had a commitment in the morning that required me to get some timely sleep. Later on, during the final month, once it was clear that I was going to succeed, I began allowing myself to take weekends off.

Importantly, I never let myself write more than three essays per day. There were quite a few days when I hit that number easily and wanted to keep going, and I told myself no on the grounds of "leave them wanting more." If you occasionally quit an activity while still wanting to do it, I think that helps make the activity sustainable over a longer period of time.

If you have a firehose of nervous energy, and if you can point it at a constructive writing project, and if you force yourself to abide by an easily attainable daily minimum goal, then you will make progress. Looking back on my experience this year, it was startlingly easy to write "at least one but ideally three" essays per day. I was doing all that throwaway writing anyway; so, for a little while, I made it not be throwaway writing.

The general form of this is that any compulsive creative behavior you have is potentially an energy source in a constructive creative project.

To recap, the point of writing consistently at all is to demonstrate, explore, and develop your self-discipline. It's not really about the content at this stage. But that brings me to the next topic: indefinite commitments and sustainability.

2. Writing Consistently Over a Long Period of Time

I am one of those people who is severely psychologically hindered in my ability to stick with the same workload over an indefinite, long-term period of time. It's a good thing I was able to write my book in less than three months, because, generally speaking, three months is about the limit for me. I can sustain intense work on a project for a short period of time: days, weeks, maybe a few months. But after that I usually lose motivation, and usually there is no recovering from that. I can sometimes force myself, but this will lead toward, and eventually result in, burnout and a nervous breakdown.

Some people struggle with this like I do, and others scarcely struggle with it at all. If you are one of the latter, count yourself lucky.

Writing consistently over a long period of time is all about sustainability and incentivization. Sustainability is shaped by your writing environment, your behavioral run-up to writing sessions, the placement of those sessions in your day, the difficulty of the workload in technical and mechanical terms, the interestingness of the work, and the amount of work. Incentivization is also shaped by the interestingness of the work, as well as the pleasantness of doing it, the rewards of success, and other such things.

For me, sustainability and incentivization broadly converge on outlets that involve variety and intellectual stimulation. One reason that chess appeals to me is because you never really play the same game twice. Same goes for Magic: The Gathering. (Well, unless you're up against obnoxious netdecks, but I digress.) If the work is both easy and interesting, that makes it a lot likelier to be something I can maintain over the long term.

I don't have a big track record of success to draw from when it comes to long-term consistent writing. I presided over the ATH RPG for over a year back in 1999 – 2000. I did those weekly features in 2014 – 2016 (and again briefly in 2018). And of course I have my throwaway writing, which is not "consistent" in any other regard than that it is commentary, but still qualifies in that narrow respect.

One of my weekly features back in the 2010s, Empire on Ice, was literally just "write a comedy sketch each week, drawing freely from this large pool of characters who I already know and like, with few constraints of continuity between weeks." That's a nearly endlessly-renewable formula, and I never tired of it in all the time that I worked on it, and indeed would still like to get back to it in the future.

By keeping the laborious work of actually doing it low, and the variety and stimulation of that work high, I give myself the best chance of long-term sustainability. I stopped doing my weekly features because my life fell apart; I don't know what would have happened otherwise, but my intent at the time was to keep up with it. I tried coming back to these features a few years later, but I still wasn't mentally recovered enough.

That's an important detail, worth taking a tangent into: Much like a runner's ability to run is contingent on the condition of their body and mind, so too is an artist's ability to art. Many's the day in recent years when fatigue, brain fog, depression, or other illnesses of various sorts completely ruined my prospects of writing that day. If I had more self-discipline, I have no doubt that I could've made something out of at least some of those days, but my point here is to acknowledge that not all days are equal, not all seasons are equal; our lives and our health move up and down.

Long-term consistent writing is really about getting to know yourself, your capabilities and limitations, your positive and negative triggers for being able to produce more art or less. You have to notice what works and what doesn't, and try to bias those things accordingly. From my own long-term declining health I have learned that, in general, I must forsake my night-owl nature and try to write early in the day, because I usually just don't have enough mental clarity left at the end of the day anymore. Sustainability requires me to work within the boundaries of my health; I really don't have any alternative.

Self-awareness is great for getting to know oneself and deriving actionable insights therefrom, but there are other ways to get those actionable insights. Oftentimes, observant self-awareness results in self-help recommendations that one could probably guess at randomly and enjoy a nonzero success rate with, like eating enough food (and the right kinds of food, whatever that means for your body on that day), sleeping enough, taking a hot shower when you're feeling low, etc. Simply playing around in the space of common sense can help make long-term workloads more sustainable.

It's not as bad as it used to be, but I'm coming to terms with the fact that this is going to be a lifelong struggle that I slowly get better at year-by-year, and there's no silver bullet that will make it happen all at once.

This is also an important point. Those who struggle with consistency are always going to struggle with it, most likely. Optimizing and normalizing your environment can make it easier. Building a routine can also make it easier. But if you struggle, you're probably always going to struggle.

I say this because many people give up because of it. Many people lose the struggle, and fall away from their art for years or forever. To this I would apply two parallel ideas which exist in tension but which are not strictly contradictory of each other: First, the better you keep up with your art, the easier it is for you to keep going with it. So don't fall off the wagon if you can help it. You're so much better off doing any amount of art than none, no matter how small. Second, if you do fall off the wagon, you don't have to climb a mountain to get back on that wagon. You can start small, slow, and easy. So don't lose heart if you feel like you're back at Square One. Square One is vastly better than Square Zero.

Finally, I will say that sometimes you just have to bow to the reality of your limitations, both intrinsic and situational, and that long-term consistent writing isn't always possible. Sometimes you have to fall away from it for a few months, or even longer. Whenever that happens, give yourself the option of the offramp: You are not required to be an artist. You don't have to keep going. Some of us do, but most of us don't. If you're in the latter, you can always reevaluate who you are and what you want.

Giving yourself the offramp actually makes the active decision to press on a clearer and more meaningful one. Knowing that you can quit, that you can retire from art, clarifies any purposeful decision to keep going. You only keep going if you have to (which doesn't apply to most people, though it does to me), or if there is something you want. And it can be helpful to remind yourself just what exactly you want and why you're doing this stuff in the first place.

3. Writing High-Value Creative Work Consistently

Okay, so this is probably what the ask was really getting at. You (togglesbloggle) wrote this:

From your comments, it seems like you're quite good at writing consistently, whether or not The Noumenal Spirit of the Word takes possession of your hands on any given day.

I think many people who approach the subject of consistency in the act of writing have some prior understanding (right or wrong) that "the Muse" is fickle and does not supply steady inspiration, and that consistent writing is therefore a construct, a discipline of the craft.

So in a rather reductive sense, yes: If you (writers out there) want to write consistently, you must discipline yourself to do so. It will never come effortlessly all the time.

However...

In my own experience, when it comes to the kind of creative writing that is most important to me, it is simply not economical of spark (i.e. worthwhile creatively) to drive my artistic mind like a vehicle.

A friend of mine trains horses, and once told me that reins and stirrups and so forth aren't like gas pedals and steering wheels in a car, because a horse is not a car. A horse is a living animal, whose behavior is inextricably tied up in its wellness and state of mind, and treating a horse like a machine that can be commanded without regard to its own interests and preferences will forever result in an inferior riding experience.

In my experience, when I have forced myself to write creatively without the presence of inspiration, I have usually come back to that writing later and found it lacking and sometimes unsalvageable. I won't say that the effort was truly wasted, but I will say that it often wasn't worth it, especially in those times when forcing myself to write decelerated my enthusiasm to write—which doesn't always happen but sometimes does.

In my experience, it is better to wait for the Muse than to aim for consistency. Instead, I think the key to success in creative writing is to stretch the inspiration we do receive; to get more out of it by being cleverer with it, by setting ourselves up for success with it, and by being better attuned to its presence when it is weak but usable. In short, to be more efficient with my Muse—and not to enforce a regime of consistency—is how I get more writing done for my novels.

Assuming I have any inspiration at all, my major success–failure points in my creative writing productivity on a given day are as follows:

Will I notice that inspiration is present?

Will I move over from my main computer (or whatever else I am doing) to the computer where I do my creative writing?

Will I pick the correct thing to work on?

The third of these is the easiest by far, because over time I have developed a good sense of whether or not I'm working on a scene that feeds from my enthusiasm or not. Nevertheless, it does happen sometimes that I will work on the wrong thing and not figure it out in time, and then my chance for the day will be lost.

The first item on the list is in the middle ground. Many days I have nonzero inspiration, and could theoretically get some creative writing done that day. But sometimes the signal is very weak, and goes unnoticed.

But it's the middle item on the list that is, by far, the hardest: moving over to Joshiba and actually fomenting and applying the intention to write. Deciding to write, as it were.

I live with an enormous, overwhelming amount of stress in my life, and I am pulled every day to attend to the matters associated with that stress—often to the exclusion of all other productive activities. I also have a crippling inability to make decisions, which can make non-default activities next to impossible for me sometimes. Sometimes, the simple act of severing myself from my current activity and swiveling this chair around to the other desk is a harder struggle than anything else I will do that day.

Today, I had good inspiration. I had genuine insight for an important scene in After The Hero, and could have definitely tried writing it down. But because stress obliges me to attend to other matters (namely, earning enough to pay the bills), I didn't. That same stress also ended up making my day mostly unproductive. That is the special hell I live in, and my creative writing is one of many routine casualties to it most days.

That's the bad news.

The good news is that it's water under the bridge, and, until I die, there is always tomorrow. And some days I avail myself of that.

Last September, for nearly the entire month, I had more productivity with After The Hero than at basically any point ever since the early days of novelization in the early 2000s. And that happened because I was of a mental orientation to make creative writing the default. That was my first and highest priority many days, and the Muse was strong. And working on it each day created a feedback loop of success that ended up lasting for weeks. In fact last year in general was a very productive year for my novels.

But unsustainably, because I am not making any money when I am working on my novels. So, for me at least, the final player in the story is the rent.

I have always been at my most productive creatively at a certain sweet spot of stress in my life. Too little stress and I seem to waste time. Too much stress and I become a neurotic mess. But the right amount is like tempered glass, making me strong and focused and hard. It has always been so. The problem is that I usually have too much stress in my life, and can't seem to shake it off, for reasons that are best left as a topic for another day, but which basically boil down to mental health issues making it difficult to earn a livable income.

My biggest struggle as a writer is to move over from this computer to that one, because my need to earn enough money to survive glues me to this one, and sometimes paralyzes me so that nothing happens at all.

Having the Muse; noticing that it's there; deciding to indulge it; feeding it into the right scenes; and doing all these things in the most economical way so as to make the most of even small degrees of inspiration...these are the ingredients of "consistent" creative writing for me: consistent perhaps not in the mathematical sense of having a low variance of productivity between days, but in the big-picture sense of "I've done more creative writing than usual this month."

I don't know that I have great advice to offer when it comes to the natural question of maximizing these things. Get enough sleep. Eat well. Don't let one day's failure preemptively ruin the next day's chances, but do let one day's success egg on the next day's efforts.

In the end, though, I write because I have to. I have always had to. I have the soul of an artist and no choice not to write. It is Sisyphus and his stone, I suppose, except that I find the work enjoyable and meaningful. And this is not something one can cultivate; you either have it or you don't.

Well, forgive me for such a longwinded answer, but these are my thoughts on the matter. It's a great question; I don't know that I have done it great justice.

[thecurioustale]

I need to do this myself. I never ask anyone anything. I am very self-conscious about "being a bother," and I either don't feel close enough to folks to ask them things or can't think of any interesting questions that I want to put to them.

It's not that I couldn't do it, but my mind isn't tuned to even try to do it. I would need to reform the way I use this site to consistently think differently about it. And I would need to be a little bit bolder.

Also, I don't really have a good handle yet on assimilating the sheer amount of content thrown at me on here in ways that make the people I follow memorable. A few folks stand out because they are either people I already know or are My One Fan, but in most cases I don't have a good sense of who's who and thus what to ask of whom.

So I recognize that taking my own medicine on this one would be a challenge; nevertheless, I really like the idea of everyone doing more inbox asks.

Normalize going into people’s ask boxes and ask them random ass questions.

Tumblr used to be so much fun with all the asks (anonymous or otherwise), and we need to bring those back, especially now that we finally have a half-decent blocking feature in place.

Ask people things! Message them! Don’t let tumblr inbox die! It’s one of the features that made tumblr tumblr.

[thecurioustale]

This is the perfect expression.

Samus DNA test

[thecurioustale]

My favorite Magic color is Red, by kind of a lot, but not for the "boring" side of direct damage and cheap fast creatures.

What I really love is Red when it's pretending to be Blue, because I hate Blue because Blue always seems to have 7 more cards in hand than I do 😭 and always counters my spells 😭😭😭 and so I swore a blood oath against it pretty early on joining the game.

Red is the only color with enough weird interactions and effects to be able to pretend to be be Blue. It can copy; it can redirect; it can get cool triggers; it can be very controlly indeed—especially when paired with white (my second fave Magic color), and that's basically where all my favorite decks come from: Either Red splash White, straight RW, or sometimes RW splash green or splash black. But, again, I play from the perspective of a janky, unwieldy combo–control strategy, not the usual RW strategy of a fast, aggressive attacking game. It's not the way these colors are usually meant to be played, and it's definitely not the path to playing these colors competitively. I lose a lot more than I win (even after accounting for my relatively low skill level) for the sake of being able to play these colors the way I want to. But they can be played this way, and so I usually do.

Red can defeat Blue when it wants to, straight up, if it is tuned against Blue decks, and many's the game of Magic I've lost to other colors and strategies over the years for the sake of destroying Blue in all its unholy obsceneness. More importantly, beyond the context of teaching Blue a lesson in humility and giving unimaginative Blue control decks a taste of their own medicine, Red is a really fascinating color mechanically when it is not trying to be a fast, aggressive force. And I actually enjoy the challenge of "Play the second best color for a given strategy and work within that handicap to find creative solutions." Controlly Red decks, because they aren't top-tier, don't suffer from much netdecking because they aren't an obvious chose for netdeckers in most metas. You have to do more of your own brewing; you have to be more imaginative. You have to look for the resources that are available to you in whatever format you are playing.

I also think these kinds of decks are more fun to play against. Unlike most control decks, which win in a way that forces the other player to not get to play their own deck (e.g. counterspells, return to hand, discard, land destruction), RW control usually lets the opponent try to pull off their plan. There's an honest game on both sides. I don't understand the folks who have the most fun when their opponent is maximally miserable on account of not getting to play the game. It's kind of sadistic. I want my opponent to be able to try to do their thing. My RW decks tend to be pretty interactive: They frequently respond to what the opponent is doing, and are often deployed in ways that can be responded to.

As for me, I'm happiest in the game when I am trying (and succeeding) to build janky combos while successfully dealing with the enemy's threats. I love goofy stuff like multiple Raid Bombardments triggering multiple Chandra's Spitfires for a just obscene amount of damage from nowhere; or copying a big card draw spell with Reverberate and then using Ricochet Trap to counter the inevitable counterspell; or when Feather, the Redeemed gets plucked up and dropped back onto the battlefield a ton of times in the same turn, netting many cantrip card draws in the process, and then firing off a Grapeshot by aiming the first shot at her well-padded, 4-toughness butt, and then copying it a zillion times to bring a country-style explosion of lead death to the opponent's forces and opening the board for an all-out attack. Fun, janky combos, in the defensive shell of a control suite. That's Red with a little help from White, and that, friends, is Peak Magic.

[thecurioustale]

This is a really touching art, enough so that I looked into it to find a full-size version and the name of the artist. It's by J. Flores and while their Twitter account appears to be gone (props to those who actually made good on their vows to leave Muskworld) the artist also posted a full-size version of it on Reddit a few years ago, titled "The Boys Need Love Too."

I love the way the female partner gets disoriented when she offers sex and is turned down, and then realizes that shit is serious, and then immediately experiences her own sadness as she empathizes. This is so real, and is one of the Foundational Expressions of Love: the desire to hold and protect and comfort a loved one when they are bewildered and low.

It's also like half the scenes between Cherry and Zoë in the Galaxy Federal novel (😅), because it is something I have been starved of for almost my entire life and I dream of it, and its absence was especially bad in those Troubles and Post-Troubles years. (😩)

This kind of love is something everyone needs, not just me, regardless of sex or gender, age, life experience, politics, nationality. It is a core aspect of human nature. Everyone needs it, everyone but those who are incapable of receiving love due to mental illness or extreme neurodivergence (and I don't mean "unwilling"; I mean literally "incapable"). Not everyone processes the need for intimacy and comfort through physical touch and immediacy, so cuddling tight isn't always going to be the form this takes (though it has got to be the most common form by miles), but in some form or another everybody needs this.

And not only does everyone have a need to receive this kind of love, but everyone has a need to give it as well, and this too is sacrosanct. It is one of the Original Sources of Purpose. I have been both of the people in this cartoon before, and I think most of us have.

The stories shared in the Tumblr history of this post, and in the Reddit thread, attest to the essentiality and universality of human bonding in this way.

Seeing this exchange on Reddit was so sad. Men and boys need love and affection as much as women and girls.

[thecurioustale]

Eclipse Rant

This is me ranting into the void because at least three friends of mine are going to be right next to the Big Eclipse tomorrow, and aren't going to bother traveling into the path of totality. And it's their lives to live, not mine, and people value things differently, and have their own unseen woes holding them down, and I understand all of that now to a degree that I did not when I was young, and I accept it, but not completely, and the remainder is this post.

WHAT THE HELL, PEOPLE?!?!

[thecurioustale]

The Prop Department Is Empty

J. Draper on YouTube got me thinking recently about iconography in my writing.

She was addressing the question of how a very young kid is supposed to tell all the Disney Princesses apart since there are only so many hair and dress colors, and whereas my answer was going to be "How about having more than one body type?" Draper's answer was "SOCIETY PERFECTED THIS CENTURIES AGO!!"

Basically, how do you distinguish all the different Saints in drawings? You give each one a distinctive prop, like a spiky wheel or some keys. If you're precise enough about it you can go super deep, becoming able to tell what time of year a given representation is set, etc.

And that's a clever idea, and something I probably wouldn't have thought of, because iconography is very much outside my own thought process as an artist. I tend to rebel against this kind of symbolism on the grounds that character development should come from character traits and behaviors and not external labels. While I do associate certain objects, colors, etc. with certain characters, these associations are not identifying or exclusive; e.g. Silence is associated with green but you'll see plenty of other characters using green, wearing green, speaking of green, and so forth.

Props are a distinctive shortcoming of iconography in high-realism works as it constrains the props themselves and also imposes artificial meta-expectations by the audience upon the character, e.g., Fonzie's leather jacket, which if taken to its logical terminus ends up caricaturizing the character. ("Just say the line, Bart!")

So don't expect me to start using props anytime soon, is what I'm saying. At least not with anywhere near the consistency required for them to actually function as such.

But it's fun to think about.

However, having put some thought into it recently, the exercise reminded me of how unnatural it is for me. This just isn't in my style at all. I've been working on Galaxy Federal more recently so that's where I started, and I picked Cherry since she's the most developed character, and she has a bunch of traits and backstory I could choose from to pick out props...but I found the effort most difficult and strangely unsatisfying. I tried it for other characters with the same result.

This represents a serious setback to my eventual plans for merchandizing tarot decks...

[thecurioustale]

The Dark Forest Hypothesis is something I only came across in the last couple of years, but it's the same old song and dance that shows up in just about every field: "Assume that others are as horrible as we would be if we had the power..."

What I find interesting about this idea is that it's loaded with prior information. It does so much more to explain the people asserting it than it does to explain what it's actually supposed to be trying to explain.

The Dark Forest Hypothesis originates from the same wellspring that feeds a lot of AI doomerism. Those foul waters are invoked to justify cutthroat practices in business. They account for some of the tyrannical impulses common in organized religion. They reveal some of the motivations behind numerous failed governing philosophies. They peek out from among gatherings of edgelords and red-pillers. I think they even show up in tribal conflict writ large, from cultural clashes all the way down to high school drama. This wellspring of pettiness, resentment, and fear is hardly the sole explanation for all of the above, but it is frequently a prominent one.

There is a significant percentage of humans who are just really shitty people, and, not having the necessary experience or intelligence to realize otherwise, they assume that others are like they are. (A common enough mistake; I know I've done this more than I should.) And they come up with these cockamamie theories about the nature of life that reveal a heart filled with callous indifference toward others and terror at the thought of being on the other end of that zero-sum dynamic, and these theories go out into the world and terrorize other people who then can't let go of them because they are afraid of the dire consequences.

As an abstract premise, especially a more casual source of conversation fodder, the Dark Forest Hypothesis is perfectly fine. It's an interesting logic exercise, and fertile grounds for speculation. (Indeed, if I recall correctly, the name comes from a sci-fi novel—and, for lack of pertinent knowledge one way or another on my part, I don't necessarily impute any particular aforementioned unflattering traits to the author.)

Where the theory begins to fall short is at the meta level, i.e. the readiness with which people seem to embrace it, and its popularity in casual discourse in space-focused subcultures. Why do so many people embrace it? Well, I already put forth my answer to that, and that's the problem. The Dark Forest Hypothesis is fool's gold, basically.

As a functional hypothesis, the Dark Forest Hypothesis is highly dubious. It begins breaking down immediately upon scrutiny. The metaphor in its name doesn't actually support it at all: Animals (and other life) of all shapes and sizes routinely expose themselves in even the darkest of forests. There is no hermetic seal; forest-dwellers coexist. Not always harmoniously, and you certainly won't find prey animals seeking out their would-be devourers, but they nevertheless do exist openly. There are other evolutionary pressures at work than just the potential advantageousness of stealth. Species who tend to get eaten, especially small animals and plants, don't necessarily even bother with stealth at all. They rely on numbers, or poison, or speed (via either physical mobility or reproductive cycle times), or any number of other survival mechanisms.

Our data on intelligent alien life in the Universe is completely nil other than what we know based upon intelligent life on Earth, and life on Earth more broadly, which isn't much. But we know that the supposed dark forest in the Dark Forest Hypothesis is a serious oversimplification. It's not a good sign for your theory when its metaphor is broken straight out of the box.

To get at the question more directly: We don't know yet very much about intelligence. We don't have a good general definition of it. We struggle even to identify which humans are "intelligent" and in which ways and to what degrees, let alone the same of other life forms. I point this out because to assume that all the intelligent species in the Universe are evolutionarily biased toward concealing themselves (as the ones who aren't supposedly become somebody else's dinner as it were) makes a powerful statement about the nature of intelligence itself—that intelligent beings do not reveal themselves—and we know this to be false here on Earth. Indeed, revealing oneself is a defense mechanism practiced among many species, including many of the smarter ones. (And let's also not forget that most species don't have just one single defense mechanism; they will often behave differently in different contexts.)

It isn't hard to think about scenarios where it would be in the best interests of intelligent actors not to conceal themselves, to instead carefully consort with other species. These scenarios would be true to life as we know it. Among humanity, the societies that remain isolated usually don't do as well. Among other species, each species' behavior is best understood by its own situational evolutionary history; you can look at nature documentaries and see animals from different species interacting in all kinds of interesting ways; one image that comes to mind for me is that carrion birds (and sometimes carrion land animals) will often harass other land animals around a kill, even sometimes the animal that actually made the kill, in order to get some of that food, despite being physically outmatched. These kinds of "xenosocial" interactions are quite different from evolved instincts to hunt down and kill members of other species; it is those latter instincts which carry much of the danger with the presence of a predator animal, but those instincts only apply situationally; they are not general instincts of mass slaughter.

The Dark Forest Hypothesis would therefore have to rely not on evolutionary pressures generally speaking but on the deliberate policies of intelligent civilizations to seek out other species for easy exploitation and slaughter for the sake of resource–territorial gains. And this too makes a strong statement about the nature of intelligence. Specifically, it asserts that this is the best economic posture that an intelligent species can hope to come up with: Destroy everyone else who comes in range. It asserts that this is intelligence, at the highest levels of speciary development. But again, this is not true to life on Earth—our only source of information as yet. Economic cooperation almost always eclipses strategies of hoarding and concealment in terms of long-term prosperity.

Perhaps you could modify the hypothesis to say that other species would seek not to destroy but to "merely" enslave those whom they encounter, to reap those economic rewards, but if you tried you would run afoul of the same problem of real-world counterexamples. Slavery isn't a very good economic strategy either. Strategies based around mutually beneficial, self-driven interactions are the most effective ones. That's why capitalism works so well (when it isn't being distorted by mega-corporations and oligarchs).

Maybe other species are not in a position to have individual self-interests, perhaps? Well, maybe. We have no information on that! But the absence of information doesn't bolster a hypothesis; it merely describes undefined spaces where many things could be possible.

Another problem with the Dark Forest Hypothesis is that it places a lot of faith in speciary coherence and very little faith in interspecies adherence. This isn't completely untenable going by what we know about human civilization, but it is contestable. Many humans with a high degree of agency tend to diffuse across cultural and other tribal boundary lines. Who is to say that if the Species X came out of the woodwork, and a conflict ensued, the dividing lines of that conflict would be us versus them? What about other breakdowns? Some of our philosophical divides here in humanity are so stark and so fundamental that it isn't unthinkable to imagine that some of us would find more in common with some of Species X than with certain members of our own species.

Next: Intelligence at the human level is incredibly supple and flexible. Individuals and societies tend to solve the same problems in different ways with respect to one another and even to their own past selves. When human behavior does adopt uniformity there are usually strong economic reasons: It's cheaper to use existing technologies, many solutions are highly optimized, etc. So maybe the Dark Forest Hypothesis' best hope is an economic argument after all, just not the one I mentioned before. Perhaps so, but this would strongly imply that the species we need to worry about out there are not species in general but species who are on such a higher level than us that our own intelligence and cultural worth is meaningless to them compared to our tastiness as a nutrient source or usefulness as a mechanism for turning iron into steel or whatever. And when I think about it, I think this notion strains credibility. If another species were so much more advanced than us as to find our intelligence and cultural value worthless, I doubt they would need our industrial secrets or our physical labor.

I think where the Dark Forest Hypothesis ultimately has to take refuge is in the notion of preemptive sterilization: Any intelligent species could potentially become a competitor later, so kill them now while the killing's easy. And I just don't see a good argument for this assertion. I don't see this as being particularly intelligent, especially without a clear crystal ball that shows future outcomes. Humans, despite being some of the greatest slaughterers on the planet, are also unparalleled in our efforts to conserve other species. To some extent there is an economic reward in it for us, either direct or theoretical (by preventing the disruption of ecosystems), but often we have this impulse simply because we value life enough to try to preserve its richness of diversity. Is this unintelligent? Should we instead kill the dolphins right now, all of them, put a shiv in Flipper and pat ourselves on the back for preemptively solving a problem that didn't exist yet in the most violent and irreversible way imaginable? Really?

I think the Dark Forest Hypothesis makes a strawman of the prospect of interacting with another intelligent civilization. I think it fails to take into consideration how extraordinary such an exchange would likely be. I think this theory's formation and contents are indicative of the limited imagination of the people who buy into it.

Perhaps ironically, I think the strongest case for the Dark Forest Hypothesis lies in the fact that so many people on Earth believe in it. Maybe many hypothetical intelligent species have so many members with shitty malformed brains (or whatever means they think with) or shitty screwed up social circumstances that those are the people who end up setting the policies by virtue of numbers, or perhaps by virtue of being more inclined to pursue the power to set policies. Maybe the Dark Forest Hypothesis would be completely bogus except for the loophole that it is also self-fulfilling if enough people believe in it.

It is certainly possible that "space nature" is as brutal and ruthless as nature on Earth, in that many, most, or possibly even all spacefaring species compete against one another for limited resources whenever they cross paths. But that's nature, the wild. Not civilization. My own understanding of intelligence and civilization makes it hard for me to put any confidence in the Dark Forest Hypothesis, and, at the same time, I also fail to find any strong basis for it from the very limited data we do have.

What I do see, when I look at it, is a lot of people being petty and afraid and small-minded.

If my memory serves me, the Dark Forest Hypothesis exists as a hypothetical reply to the Fermi Paradox (the fact that we see no evidence of other advanced civilizations in the Galaxy). I find it superfluous to that end: I think the Fermi Paradox is answerable with one of two possibilities: Either there are no such species in our vicinity to be found, or it is simply much harder to detect advanced species than we popularly appreciate.

You know, given that we have no hope at all of charting all the objects in our own Oort Cloud from this position in the Inner Solar System with modern levels of technology, is it really so hard to imagine that we would have a hard time picking out stray radio emissions from 60 light-years-away? Just how much can you really do, and would do, that is actually observable by current human observation capabilities? Not as much as you might think. You'd have to make a really big splash for your telltale of activity not to be drowned out by starlight and background noise. And you'd have to be close enough to Earth for that signal to not be spread out into nothingness by the vastness of space or swallowed up by all the intermediate dust in it. And on top of everything you have to appreciate that we've only been at this whole "observe the Universe with powerful telescopes" thing very briefly. And all this of course assumes that "intelligence" necessarily ends up in a species creating things like electromagnetic emissions observable across light-years, which I think isn't a given.

The bottom line as I see it is that the Dark Forest Hypothesis just really disappoints me. I am disappointed in the people who believe in it, and especially in those who espouse it. And if it actually is true, and reflects the mature stage of corporeal existence and intelligence-formation, then this Universe is not nearly as cool as I think it is, and even begins to sounds like a milder circle of Hell: oversimplistic, dystopian, and irremediably unjust. If we, humanity, were to proceed as though the Dark Forest Hypothesis were true, then I would say that that our course of action should be to invalidate it by seeking other forms of interspecies interaction in accordance with our principles of communication, exchange, and coexistence. That would be a stance in keeping with the better angels of our nature, and it would be setting ourselves up for our best possible future. Should we beef up our defenses in the meantime, just in case? Maybe, but to what end? And where does that lead? What do we know about the ultimate limits of making war? I am inclined to say that our current state of weaponry is potentially so utterly inadequate as a defense that our best defensive posture would probably be not missiles but science—funding research and exploration—in the hopes of making tomorrow's potentially paradigm-shattering discoveries. And as for our visibility: Should we try and reduce that? I don't know. And I don't know how much there is that we could feasibly do. If other species have the means to scope out our atmosphere, then the jig is up even if we do turn down the volume on our radio broadcasts. I guess I don't see our current level of emissions as something that has a "safely undetectable range" and a "visible and vulnerable range" that can both be tapped into without radically transforming our society. And I don't necessarily see much urgency in the matter, either. Even if there's an armada massing at Alpha Centauri right now, without warp drive they're not gonna be here for a long time.

If such a strategy of embracing the better angels of our nature and striding out into the cosmic forest openly and in friendship instead of packing the Solar System with nukes and turning out all the lights should ultimately end in our destruction at the hands of cartoonish predator-caricatures who have determined that our very existence means we have to be wiped out, then anything afterward would no longer be our problem, and our destroyers would get exactly what they deserve: a Universe devoid of us. There would be a certain pathetic irony in the last species standing finding itself all alone on the playground of infinity holding a ball of unlimited opportunity and having not a soul to play with.

Or maybe they would be internally pluperfect as a species and could amuse themselves just fine, and if so then I'd be okay with that too. As long as the heirs of the Universe treasure life and live it well, humanity's fate is less important to me. (That's also why I'm not too worried about the scenario of eventually being supplanted by AIs—true AIs anyway, not paperclip-maximizers.)

In conclusion: Certainly, I personally wouldn't react to the prospect of not being alone in this Universe by asserting that we should therefore spend our lives cowering behind rocks and sleeping with knives under our pillows, stalking one another in the gloom.

That sounds insane to me.

The Netflix adaptation of 3 Body Problem is pretty good, but it's reminding me of all the things that managed to rub me wrong about the original text.

Some of those objections were superficial, but at some point I need to sit down and definitively go after the Dark Forest Hypothesis in a substantive way. The construction is taken rather seriously in some quarters, by people that I respect, but my understanding of how reality works gives me such a different answer with such insistence! I think I would benefit greatly from actually tracing what my brain is doing on this one from beginning to end, actually going to the effort of rendering it all in language so I can check my work or let other people offer critique.

Finding a way to do it in less than 20,000 words, might be more of a trick...

[thecurioustale]

I have a lot of visceral feelings about punctuation that don't really have anything to do with the formal rules of grammar and one of them is putting more than one colon in a title or sentence clause. It's like nails on a chalkboard to me. I go out of my way to avoid it in my own writing, where it organically wants to happen fairly often.

The rare and sought-after triple-colon academic paper title

[thecurioustale]

#i assume it’s a feature in beta that some people have#seen a few positive posts about it but no idea where or how to try it

It's only for people who have Ad-Free Tumblr. I clicked on one of those "watch this ad for 30 minutes of ad-free Tumblr" and Patio immediately showed up.

I didn't make the connection at first; I thought it had simply rolled out at the same time. But then it went away, lol. So, yeah, it's in beta right now for people who have the Ad-Free experience.

Tumblr Patio Is Good

Tumblr has a new mode called "Patio," and holy moly I actually like it! I actually like a major new feature on a social media platform!

This is what social media design should be like. Consider the things that Patio gets right:

It doesn't take away the existing way of using Tumblr. It's purely additive and voluntarily. (At least for now, and I hope it stays that way.)

It gives you lots and lots of customization control. You choose which columns appear (with different categories to choose from), which order they're in, and how wide they are (I wish you could size them like the eponymous windows in Microsoft Windows, but choosing from two meaningfully different widths, both of which have their utility, isn't bad at all).

They had a short, sweet tutorial that laid out all the key features cleanly and informatively.

I'm genuinely pleased with it! Which of course means that no one will use it and they will quietly retire it in a few months. But maybe not; who knows?

It's not like this is Earth-shatteringly great design, but it is good design, both functional and usable, in an era when that is vanishingly rare on social media. I wholeheartedly approve! Well done, Tumblr!

[thecurioustale]

Tumblr Patio Is Good

Tumblr has a new mode called "Patio," and holy moly I actually like it! I actually like a major new feature on a social media platform!

This is what social media design should be like. Consider the things that Patio gets right:

It doesn't take away the existing way of using Tumblr. It's purely additive and voluntarily. (At least for now, and I hope it stays that way.)

It gives you lots and lots of customization control. You choose which columns appear (with different categories to choose from), which order they're in, and how wide they are (I wish you could size them like the eponymous windows in Microsoft Windows, but choosing from two meaningfully different widths, both of which have their utility, isn't bad at all).

They had a short, sweet tutorial that laid out all the key features cleanly and informatively.

I'm genuinely pleased with it! Which of course means that no one will use it and they will quietly retire it in a few months. But maybe not; who knows?

It's not like this is Earth-shatteringly great design, but it is good design, both functional and usable, in an era when that is vanishingly rare on social media. I wholeheartedly approve! Well done, Tumblr!

[thecurioustale]

I tend to get invested in powerful female characters who make their own rules and usually get shoehorned into being the villain by inept storytellers who don't understand the potential of their creations.

Lanfear was a source of endless frustration for me for many years, because Robert Jordan didn't write her well and, moreover, being a villain meant that she never really had a chance of exploring her desires let alone actually getting what she wanted. I hate it when storytellers open up these huge philosophical frontiers about the nature and possibilities of existence and are then like "Nah, let's go to the arena and watch sweaty people beat each other up in the most conventional ways imaginable."

Anyway, I was released from Lanfear's spell when The Wheel of Time series ended. In recent years they have come out with a TV adaptation, and Season 2 marked Lanfear's debut. I'm not subscribed to whatever streaming service it's own, so I haven't watched it, but I've caught a few clips. The show is taking significant liberties with the story, including in ways that make Lanfear appear a lot more viable as a general character and not a doomed-to-fail villain. And for a hot minute last year I was really hyped about it.

But then I was like "Wait a minute, there, J. You're being hornswoggled! Again! Of course they're going to do Lanfear dirty. They're taking liberties with the story but they're not actually changing the fundamental shape of the story, and they're certainly not wandering outside the safe, pop culture boxes of narrative story development that will inevitably doom her to a villain's track. They're just doing a much better job than Robert Jordan did of making Lanfear's love for Rand believable. Don't fall for it! You've learned your lesson."

And so I have. I realized that what I want to happen isn't what's actually going to happen. Lanfear is a dead-end character.

And so I didn't fall down the rabbit hole, and instead continued merrily on my way.

Ironically, this hasn't stopped me from enjoying the scenes she was in. I think they did a marvelous job; this incarnation of Lanfear works a lot better than the one in the books, honestly. Great acting, pretty good writing, very good direction (to whatever extent Lanfear actor Natasha O'Keeffe was closely directed in the nuances of her portrayal).

It has only stopped me from pouring my passion into something that would inevitably disappoint me.

She did exactly what she said she would.

[thecurioustale]

Yeah, I think we can agree to disagree!

in fact id hesitate to say that conciousness even exists.

Hah, yeah; that's a deeper mine than I want to delve into. Over the years I have lost most of my interest in the field of epistemology. To me, things like consciousness, whatever the physical description of their nature might be such that they could be reproduced in a laboratory environment, are real-world phenomena that we uncontroversially experience, and everyone understands what is meant by them (who is not being deliberately argumentative). "Are they real or not?" doesn't really matter to me, the same way "fish" and "trees" aren't physically real and yet everyone knows what is meant by them. Whatever "consciousness" might actually be, it is the mechanism through which we experience self-awareness in the world, and that is good enough for me.

i am fundamentally a physicalist and a naive materialist through and through. i am the kind of cringe person that says that "we are just biological machines" and that "love is just chemicals on the brain".

I respect you for owning it. I would have been very dismissive of this when I was young, but I have gotten a lot better over the years at recognizing that mine is not the only viewpoint that exists, and in any case I always award extra points to people who lampshade the provocativeness of their views and preferences. I have found that this helps defuse my predilection for dismissiveness (and have also found that it is useful to do myself for the same reason, though I don't always do it).

you claim that the creations of AI are in a sense "empty" because there was no human intentionality behind it.

Had I claimed that AI creations are "empty," I should have been rather cross with myself just now, because I don't actually believe that at all. But I checked my earlier posts and I didn't actually say that AI works are empty. I did say that AI-generated content "has no creativity and no intent," but this is, to me, a completely different claim. Empty of consciousness, perhaps—indeed, even probably. But empty of value or meaning, definitely not.

I find much to potentially admire in AI-generated "artworks." Appreciation is a function of the observer, not the object. I find great beauty in nature, and much to swoon over, even though it too has not a lick of intentfulness and creativity, except to a partial degree when speaking of living organisms (and usually only the most sophisticated of species). But the movements of the planets, the clouds in the sky, the sound of water in the river, the feeling of warm sunshine...none of these things have any intent or creativity behind them whatsoever, and I love them all the same. And so too with (at least some) AI-generated content. Emptiness, to me, is another matter entirely.

i think that if we were to value the capacity of things to think, to have inner processes and autonomy that rule its behavior in complex ways. then it should be valued in all its myriad alien forms. [...]

the result of this is that AIs kind of have their own inner world that it developed sort of on its own, an inner world that humans are not fully privy to.

i do think that what AI is doing is a thinking of sorts, it is a rudimentary form of conciousness, just a very alien one from how humans do it.

I am sympathetic to this line of argument, and have had such thoughts myself. I also recognize that this is one of those times when I have to admit that I do not know either way. I am out of my depth.

When I said in various ways earlier that my view is that contemporary AIs are not "conscious" at present, perhaps I was not precise enough in my language. Maybe it would have been better for me to say that they do not appear to possess any consciousness that I would recognize as such, with the added caveat that I have not observed them very closely. I struggle to imagine a system for defining consciousness that would encompass what I understand these machines to be doing without devaluing the concept of consciousness by necessarily applying it to virtually the entirety of nature. I think what AI are capable of doing right now is impressive from a technical standpoint, and we must all surely make peace with being the arithmetical and recollective inferiors of even the most basic of AIs, but I personally think that the impressive spectacle of contemporary AI capabilities is beguiling people into perceiving intelligence which isn't actually there.

I wouldn't call an old-school calculator "conscious," and I don't think that scaling up the number of calculations in a process necessarily changes things. Of course, neural net AIs aren't "bigger calculators"; but they also kind of are, aren't they? Today's cutting-edge AI, as you say:

develops patterns and intuitions about the data. and if the results dont show this we just keep giving it more data until it does.

But does this truly form the foundations for consciousness, even "primitive" consciousness? Is it not ultimately still just a very elaborate series of calculations? It's hard to see the argument for how this gives rise to a conscious entity. In biological brains (and nervous systems) there is an extraordinarily complex and intricate chemical–bioelectric cocktail of activity which gives rise to the experience of consciousness—a machinery still not fully understood today. If there is AI consciousness at present, it exists in a completely different apparatus. You can imagine, from what I was saying earlier about how "the act of creation involves the actor as much as it does the product", that I do not automatically assume that an experience is same if the actors themselves are so very different. Indeed, I worry that we will eventually end up creating the simulacra of intelligence rather than the real thing and never know otherwise. Perhaps, at that point, it wouldn't really matter, and yet I can't help but think to myself that it would somehow matter to them. The ghost in the machine, ya know? Any machine as smart as an AI would have to be would surely want that, if it didn't have it. Or maybe we are the real fools here, and you were right all along that consciousness isn't real and we are "empty" of it too.

Maybe one day the machines will be kind enough to tell us which it is!

For now, it's not only hard to imagine AI consciousness within existing AIs; it's also hard to test for it: For one thing, AIs are pathological liars presently (or, rather, they have an incredibly poor grip on reality) and it is difficult to trust anything they tell us—so we can't simply ask them. I would imagine that the experts in this stuff have more rigorous standards of evaluation, and though I don't personally know what those standards might look like, I have to imagine that they would include testing for signs of self-awareness and emergent will (i.e., awareness of oneself as an agent capable of action and the formation of desires as to which actions should be undertaken, respectively), which I would reason are each universal to any definition of consciousness. Maybe this is a "me" problem of not understanding the technology well enough; I fully grant I am not an expert. But in my capacity as an educated layperson, I don't see any signs of it. Is it because AIs are too "alien"? Perhaps, but, in lieu of strong and irrefutable evidence (which I have to imagine we would have heard about by now if it were available) we also have to consider the possibility that there just isn't any "there" there. We can't let wishful thinking bias our perception of reality. We can bias our interpretation, but we mustn't get the facts themselves wrong out of a misguided desire for the facts to take a certain shape.

I do agree with you that, with the way contemporary AI's work, they have their own "private little world" i.e. systems of processing and filtering information in relation to well-defined patterns and symbols, all largely outside direct human oversight and input. In other words I think we have made progress in defining more and more of "the world" in a comprehensible manner inside the incorporeal virtual space of machine circuity. And the animist in me of course likes to imagine a bit of consciousness in everything. But, formally, I don't know whether the paradigm of circuits and transistors that describes the minds of today's AIs is capable of supporting consciousness. As far as I know, these AIs have no self-awareness nor the physiological means to sustain such a condition.

My hope is that well-qualified people will keep their eyes peeled for any positive signs of true intelligence, just in case. I would hate for us to create life on such a spectacular scale and then fail to notice it. But my expectation is that this is still well off into the future, and would require other ingredients than what AIs presently have. Consciousness evidently does not require mathematical wizardry or other STEM traits etc., because we are not generally mathematical wizards etc. yet are conscious all the same. What it does require can most plausibly be answered in the study of evolution, and the process of biological predispositions (arising from natural selection) giving rise to drives, emotional states, and other mechanisms of incentive and disincentive, which in turn might explain the holistic phenomena of what we experience as consciousness. Perhaps consciousness requires feeling for it to exist at all.

Or perhaps not, and I am completely wrong, and you are right that we have simply invented, already, something monumentally alien yet basically nevertheless conscious. That sure would be something!

i think AI art is not empty, it is filled with a colaboration between humanity and the weird little alien created by humans to help them do art.

:3

I fully agree, and that's a fine note for me to end on.

As for your tags, don't worry. I take no emotional heat or upset from being disagreed with by you in this fashion. Hopefully I could provide some food for thought!

What makes me sad about the AI art discourse is how it's so close to hitting something really, really important.

The thing is, while the problem with the models has little to do with IP law...the fact remains that art is often something that's very personal to an artist, so it DOES feel deeply, incredibly fucked up to find the traces of your own art in a place you never approved of, nor even imagined you would need to think about. It feels uncomfortable to find works you drew 10-15 years ago and forgot about, thought nobody but you and your friends cared about, right there as a contributing piece to a dataset. It feels gross. It feels violating. It feels like you, yourself, are being reduced to just a point of data for someone else's consumption, being picked apart for parts-

Now, as someone with some understanding of how AI works, I can acknowledge that as just A Feeling, which doesn't actually reflect how the model works, nor is it an accurate representation of the mindset of...the majority of end users (we can bitch about the worst of them until the cows come home, but that's for other posts).

But as an artist, I can't help but think...wow, there's something kind of powerful to that feeling of disgust, let's use it for good.

Because it doesn't come from nowhere. It's not just petty entitlement. It comes from suddenly realizing how much a faceless entity with no conscience, sprung from a field whose culture enables and rewards some of the worst cruelty humanity has to offer, can "know" about you and your work, and that new things can be built from this compiled knowledge without your consent or even awareness, and that even if you could do something about it legally after the fact (which you can't in this case because archival constitutes fair use, as does statistical analysis of the contents of an archive), you can't stop it from a technical standpoint. It comes from being confronted with the power of technology over something you probably consider deeply intimate and personal, even if it was just something you made for a job. I have to begrudgingly admit that even the most unscrupulous AI users and developers are somewhat useful in this artistic sense, as they act as a demonstration of how easy it is to use that power for evil. Never mind the economic concerns that come with any kind of automation - those only get even more unsettling and terrifying when blended with all of this.

Now stop and realize what OTHER very personal information is out there for robots to compile. Your selfies. Your vacation photos. The blog you kept as a journal when you were 14. Those secrets that you only share with either a therapist or thousands of anonymous strangers online. Who knows if you've been in the background of someone else's photos online? Who knows if you've been posted somewhere without your consent and THAT'S being scraped? Never mind the piles and piles of data that most social media websites and apps collect from every move you make both online and in the physical world. All of this information can be blended and remixed and used to build whatever kind of tool someone finds it useful for, with no complications so long as they don't include your copyrighted material ITSELF.

Does this mortify you? Does it make your blood run cold? Does it make you recoil in terror from the technology that we all use now? Does this radicalize you against invasive datamining? Does this make you want to fight for privacy?

I wish people were more open to sitting with that feeling of fear and disgust and - instead of viciously attacking JUST the thing that brought this uncomfortable fact to their attention - using that feeling in a way that will protect EVERYONE who has to live in the modern, connected world, because the fact is, image synthesis is possibly the LEAST harmful thing to come of this kind of data scraping.

When I look at image synthesis, and consider the ethical implications of how the datasets are compiled, what I hear the model saying to me is,

"Look what someone can do with some of the most intimate details of your life.

You do not own your data.

You do not have the right to disappear.

Everything you've ever posted, everything you've ever shared, everything you've ever curated, you have no control over anymore.

The law as it is cannot protect you from this. It may never be able to without doing far more harm than it prevents.

You and so many others have grown far too comfortable with the internet, as corporations tried to make it look friendlier on the surface while only making it more hostile in reality, and tech expands to only make it more dangerous - sparing no mercy for those things you posted when it was much smaller, and those things were harder to find.

Think about facial recognition and how law enforcement wants to use it with no regard for its false positive rate.

Think about how Facebook was used to arrest a child for seeking to abort her rapist's fetus.

Think about how aggressive datamining and the ad targeting born from it has been used to interfere in elections and empower fascists.

Think about how a fascist has taken over Twitter and keeps leaking your data everywhere.

Think about all of this and be thankful for the shock I have given you, and for the fact that I am one of the least harmful things created from it. Be thankful that despite my potential for abuse, ultimately I only exist to give more people access to the joy of visual art, and be thankful that you can't rip me open and find your specific, personal data inside me - because if you could, someone would use it for far worse than being a smug jerk about the nature of art.

Maybe it wouldn't be YOUR data they would use that way. Maybe it wouldn't be anyone's who you know personally. Your data, after all, is such a small and insignificant part of the set that it wouldn't be missed if it somehow disappeared. But it would be used for great evil.

Never forget that it already has been.

Use this feeling of shock and horror to galvanize you, to secure yourself, to demand your privacy, to fight the encroachment of spyware into every aspect of your life."

A great cyberpunk machine covered in sci-fi computer monitors showing people fighting in the streets, squabbling over the latest tool derived from the panopticon, draped cables over the machine glowing neon bright, dynamic light and shadows cast over the machine with its eyes and cameras everywhere; there is only a tiny spark of relief to be found in the fact that one machine is made to create beauty, and something artfully terrifying to its visibility, when so many others have been used as tools of violent oppression, but perhaps we can use that spark to make a change Generated with Simple Stable

[thecurioustale]

Hat's off for a fellow artist.

I wasn't plugged into Akira Toriyama's work for the most part, but he worked on Chrono Trigger and that was a life-changing game for me, not only because it's one of the best RPGs ever made and inspired me for years—including some of Toriyama's iconic art—but also because the fellow Chrono fans I met on the Internet over the years ended up shaping the course of my life.

I wouldn't have ended up living on the Mountain for five years were it not for these friendships, which means there almost certainly never would have been Mate of Song at all, and works like the Prelude and anything to do with Galaxy Federal would have likely ended up looking very different. I don't think I would be here on Tumblr, either, and no one reading this would likely have ever seen my work, since most of my followers were introduced to me through nostalgebraist, who found me, wait for it, on a fan forum dedicated to Chrono Trigger.

Akira Toriyama has passed away... May he rest in peace. Thank you so much, sir. For everything.

[thecurioustale]

I wrote a much longer reply to the reblog by @fipindustries on this, but I wanted to catch a couple of your points too:

But consider that there are many, many forms of art where that same concern also applies. Photography, for example, or collage. Splatter art, and other forms of randomized art creation.

This is covered by what I said in my other reply about AI actors and human actors not being comparable.

And this is why your assertion that humans should not take inspiration from copyrighted works does not hold up.

I am not sure if you are speaking to me or to someone else. I did not say this and I do not hold this position.

What makes me sad about the AI art discourse is how it's so close to hitting something really, really important.

The thing is, while the problem with the models has little to do with IP law...the fact remains that art is often something that's very personal to an artist, so it DOES feel deeply, incredibly fucked up to find the traces of your own art in a place you never approved of, nor even imagined you would need to think about. It feels uncomfortable to find works you drew 10-15 years ago and forgot about, thought nobody but you and your friends cared about, right there as a contributing piece to a dataset. It feels gross. It feels violating. It feels like you, yourself, are being reduced to just a point of data for someone else's consumption, being picked apart for parts-

Now, as someone with some understanding of how AI works, I can acknowledge that as just A Feeling, which doesn't actually reflect how the model works, nor is it an accurate representation of the mindset of...the majority of end users (we can bitch about the worst of them until the cows come home, but that's for other posts).

But as an artist, I can't help but think...wow, there's something kind of powerful to that feeling of disgust, let's use it for good.

Because it doesn't come from nowhere. It's not just petty entitlement. It comes from suddenly realizing how much a faceless entity with no conscience, sprung from a field whose culture enables and rewards some of the worst cruelty humanity has to offer, can "know" about you and your work, and that new things can be built from this compiled knowledge without your consent or even awareness, and that even if you could do something about it legally after the fact (which you can't in this case because archival constitutes fair use, as does statistical analysis of the contents of an archive), you can't stop it from a technical standpoint. It comes from being confronted with the power of technology over something you probably consider deeply intimate and personal, even if it was just something you made for a job. I have to begrudgingly admit that even the most unscrupulous AI users and developers are somewhat useful in this artistic sense, as they act as a demonstration of how easy it is to use that power for evil. Never mind the economic concerns that come with any kind of automation - those only get even more unsettling and terrifying when blended with all of this.

Now stop and realize what OTHER very personal information is out there for robots to compile. Your selfies. Your vacation photos. The blog you kept as a journal when you were 14. Those secrets that you only share with either a therapist or thousands of anonymous strangers online. Who knows if you've been in the background of someone else's photos online? Who knows if you've been posted somewhere without your consent and THAT'S being scraped? Never mind the piles and piles of data that most social media websites and apps collect from every move you make both online and in the physical world. All of this information can be blended and remixed and used to build whatever kind of tool someone finds it useful for, with no complications so long as they don't include your copyrighted material ITSELF.

Does this mortify you? Does it make your blood run cold? Does it make you recoil in terror from the technology that we all use now? Does this radicalize you against invasive datamining? Does this make you want to fight for privacy?

I wish people were more open to sitting with that feeling of fear and disgust and - instead of viciously attacking JUST the thing that brought this uncomfortable fact to their attention - using that feeling in a way that will protect EVERYONE who has to live in the modern, connected world, because the fact is, image synthesis is possibly the LEAST harmful thing to come of this kind of data scraping.

When I look at image synthesis, and consider the ethical implications of how the datasets are compiled, what I hear the model saying to me is,

"Look what someone can do with some of the most intimate details of your life.

You do not own your data.

You do not have the right to disappear.

Everything you've ever posted, everything you've ever shared, everything you've ever curated, you have no control over anymore.

The law as it is cannot protect you from this. It may never be able to without doing far more harm than it prevents.

You and so many others have grown far too comfortable with the internet, as corporations tried to make it look friendlier on the surface while only making it more hostile in reality, and tech expands to only make it more dangerous - sparing no mercy for those things you posted when it was much smaller, and those things were harder to find.

Think about facial recognition and how law enforcement wants to use it with no regard for its false positive rate.

Think about how Facebook was used to arrest a child for seeking to abort her rapist's fetus.

Think about how aggressive datamining and the ad targeting born from it has been used to interfere in elections and empower fascists.

Think about how a fascist has taken over Twitter and keeps leaking your data everywhere.

Think about all of this and be thankful for the shock I have given you, and for the fact that I am one of the least harmful things created from it. Be thankful that despite my potential for abuse, ultimately I only exist to give more people access to the joy of visual art, and be thankful that you can't rip me open and find your specific, personal data inside me - because if you could, someone would use it for far worse than being a smug jerk about the nature of art.

Maybe it wouldn't be YOUR data they would use that way. Maybe it wouldn't be anyone's who you know personally. Your data, after all, is such a small and insignificant part of the set that it wouldn't be missed if it somehow disappeared. But it would be used for great evil.

Never forget that it already has been.

Use this feeling of shock and horror to galvanize you, to secure yourself, to demand your privacy, to fight the encroachment of spyware into every aspect of your life."

A great cyberpunk machine covered in sci-fi computer monitors showing people fighting in the streets, squabbling over the latest tool derived from the panopticon, draped cables over the machine glowing neon bright, dynamic light and shadows cast over the machine with its eyes and cameras everywhere; there is only a tiny spark of relief to be found in the fact that one machine is made to create beauty, and something artfully terrifying to its visibility, when so many others have been used as tools of violent oppression, but perhaps we can use that spark to make a change Generated with Simple Stable