#514

Man, probably I have written everything I know into this blog twice, but I could do it for the rest of my life and not run out of different ways to say it, plus there is the living process of gaining and losing and regaining knowledge/enlightenment only to lose it again ad nauseum, plus there are functionally infinite ideas, events, and cultural artifacts to discuss, accompanied by true life stories I could tell every single day and never catch up to myself before I had to punch my ticket. I can think of about ten stories I could bang out about me real quick. This is not to brag--how will I ever stop?

Maybe I don't stop. Maybe this is the self-imposed metier for the rest of my span. I mean, I guess that's what being a writer is. 

Maybe I'll just do one immediately because my fingers are itching. GO!

*

Me and the boys were out doing parkour downtown. Hell yeah. Fourteen years old, four motherfuckers with nothing to prove except we don't give a fuck and we're not scared to prove it. Qualifiers abound--but not where we would admit them even to ourselves. That is what makes teenagers dangerous like a pack of coyotes but brittle like burnt sugar. We leaped and vaulted, tucked and rolled, climbed shit we absolutely were not supposed to and took a specific flavor of ownership over everything we gazed upon.

Indeed, activities like this are not frowned upon because they are dangerous--except by moms. The Man doesn't give a fuck if you die, though of course he prefers to turn a tidy profit from the affair, e.g., it is a noble thing for a soldier to rape and kill for massive profits (not theirs; The Man's, just to be clear) until they would be so good as to die, that is what The Man likes best. A soldier is a good example because the worst thing a soldier can do, in the mind of The Man, is not die.

He gives a fuck about three things: having power and making sure people who don't act like they understand it and accept it; the ideal situation is for them to love it, love him for having it and for using it how he pleases: thus is he motivated to loosen his fist and let flow a dribble of honey to the favored. The third thing is to feel, even fleetingly, even the suggestion, that his power is false and all it takes to break it is to simply laugh and ignore him, to act as though he does not exist, and this is sensible: The Man is contingent on belief in him, and his power and his money are a lie our ancestors trapped us in by believing in him and feeding him and letting him live in our homes and our minds. 

Certain Men in public life would probably fucking straight-up stroke out and die if someone were to ignore them just right.

So it was only to add savor to our feelings of sheer selfhood and bounteous, free-breathing free-ass freedom when some apoplectic motherfucker in a shirt with cuffs and a collar tucked into beige pants came out of an air-conditioned building where he wears a figurative diaper all day to scream that we weren't allowed and he was gonna call the cops. We laughed and ran away in such a fashion that neither he nor many cops could match--our bodies processed our oxygen intake far more efficiently than theirs, even if they ran every day, we were effortlesstly flexible, and our athleticism was under the command of sharp, undulled senses and greasy-quick stimulus reflex in a way that even as I type this, basically can't remember. Have stayed fit and gotten lot stronger, but I could never in ten thousand years try to catch my fourteen-year old self doing parkour. Would be absolutely concussed to try. Anyway the screamer was a horizontal creature and we fled in three dimensions, but indeed, only to prove to him real quick that he could not catch us if he tried.

Shortly after this incident we were running by a hedge that ran in a square around a grassy gap. The hedge was trimmed above my hip level and was about three feet wide. Figured I could do it and rode the impulse, looked before I leaped, cleared the hedge no touch forward flip and did a forward roll onto the grassy enclosure. The boys hooted appreciatively without pausing their stride, but I had seen something out of the corner of my eye during my roll that gave me hard pause. As I bound to my feet, I took in fully the half-meter vertical closed iron waterpipe pipe sticking up, which I had rolled right next to, having missed it completely in my assessment glance. 

Well, it was a glance, you see.

Spent about another forty seconds studying its placement relative to my action and satisfied myself that if I had taken another pace or two before jumping, that pipe had a real decent chance of hurting me very badly; I would even confidently say that I would have brought the entire weight of my body headfirst straight onto it and been hashing out the reality of my "free-ass freedom" and its various implications with St. Peter.

As I caught up with my friends I studied my body's reaction to having come so close to death just having some fun, and chalked it up as a natural wink from the yawning vastness of the nonbeing that birthed me and to which I shall return one fine day. Which is to say that like a good monkey I laughed it off and kept playing in the sun.

But like a cold tooth lodged somehwere in the brain, that moment and that knowledge have been a part of everything ever since; a dense lozenge of slow-release maturation that even now glints at me from the depths.

*

Factually Pointless may suffer an interruption of service, but I don't know when or if, really. All I know is that this man right here needs a new computer.

So anyway Peace! Love! Peace and Love on this Planet Earth! Other planets too! Any and all of them, really! I am the laughing monkey, and I turn away and leap into the sunshine! We are all going to die, some sooner, some later! ULTREIA, HOSSANA, PAX DEI, TERRA ET CAELUM

--JL

#513

So! The fuckin pope died. Made it to one last Easter after a dramatic wind-down, faced down one last daemond on that sacred day, and punched his ticket the morning after. As my friend Valentine quoth, "too plot-heavy."

Plot weight is essentially the main reason the Roman Catholic Church can claim it is the one true church though, and every time something like this happens, the mystic power only grows. It is banal at this point. 

It's a pope post! Don't read my blog. Factually Pointless is not kidding about its title.

*

My big takeaway from Francis' papacy is that I didn't appreciate him enough when he was alive. Another terrible cliché. Yet indeed, behold: it is so. He was just a guy, only a dude, simply a man, as well as a pope. 

He was as much my pope, representative of me and who I am and what my values and hopes are, for this world and for the church, as I had any right to hope or expect in this or any lifetime to date, and I acted entitled to him. Acted as though his humility and self-effacement was a given at best, a hypocrisy or smokescreen at worst, and I doubted his commitment to the full scope of our shared humanity and his willingness and his ability to do the job as, in my arrogance, I believe it should be done. The fact that he was not superhuman, was not able to flex his muscles and with one swift gesture put asunder the entire hierarchy and establish peace and justice for all on this world, I interpreted as failure, and I turned my nose up at him.

But it's just a job, done by a guy. As one experienced in dealing with murderous, autocratic regimes and not getting his ass poisoned or shot, he navigated the treacherous whirlpools and breakers of being a pope. He made mistakes, but he was as much the pope he set out to be as the realities of this world allow for, when nothing would have been easier than to settle into a the most luxuriant possible retirement while momentum and the will of others took care of everything. 

Important to remember that a pope, if such is is his whim, can literally eat food all day long. If the pope wants to golf or look at fine art all damn day and let a couple of their favorite cardinals be pope, it is wholly within their power--moreso perhaps than any other worldly power, the pope has the power to let Jesus take the fuckin wheel. I mean, look at all the pedophiles. These guys don't get in because the church loves pedophiles. They get in because motherfuckers don't bother to make absolutely sure they don't. And it's not possible to get them all out at once because sometimes if you use knives instead of chemo you would cut a person into quivering chunks instead of curing their cancer. It seems like the same, but it is not the same. 

So. Much more could be said, but concentrating on the main takeaway. The whole time the best pope of my lifetime and maybe the most authentically Christian pope ever, like ever, like having popes is unchristian actually but here we are, getting away from but bringing it back to me being an asshole about it, and only now that he is gone do I see the miracle.

Typical. It really is just basic. This just goes to show that I probably would have started worshipping a golden farm animal in the few hours Moses was up the mountain. Sad!

*

Now it seems to me like the big historical question is whether we will get one pope in the Vatican and one pope in Washington by executive order, Henry VIII-style, or the next pope is such an asshole we all just settle down and go about our other business, secure in the knowledge that the church serves power and is absolutely irrelevant otherwise, as is correct and proper and easy to digest.

*

Happy Pope Remains Dead Day 2 or whatever it is. Rest In Peace Francis, you were alright and I love you and I'm sorry in my heart I was mean to you in thought and spoken word and in writing too. It is down to my childishness and hubris, and I will once again work on my humility and sublimation of ego in hopes of being a better person than the one who keeps thinking that the work ever ends or that the world has solutions instead of being God's perfect infinite story.

Do wish I'd written you that letter. Though it may be for the best that I did not.

Book of Job! Book of Job! PAX INFINITUM

--JL

#512

Feeling better. No time to deliver a post today, but I did want to indicate that this had developed.

It can be said that things got a whole lot worse before they got better--as is often the case, in my experience, but one does forget. And bless this forgetting, for how else would existence be possible?

Anyway. Happy Easter tomorrow, Christ is risen, the infinite universe makes equals of us all, holy, holy, fuck yes, hail Mary, hail Satan, hail the infinite light that radiates infinite light while losing nothing of its radiance and nothing of its completeness, that Flame Imperishable.

I love you all, even those who would destroy me. 

--JL

#511

Thought of the day, related to the last post:

Consciousness is a disgusting, inheritable disease. The idea that a "higher order" of consciousness infected us with this abortive, flawed operating system is as perfectly reasonable as any other irreperably underinformed notion that our finite and completely maladaptive code generators are capable of manifesting, and the intervention of alien species as reasonable as the idea of a surveilling creator-god or pantheon. This smorgasboard of illusion holds up generation after generation because one of the symptoms of our shared illness is to see that the collective mass of interacting symptoms plays out like a big horrible perfect shakespeare play if you happen to have a comfortable balcony seat, or can imagine one, as our diseased and overburdened brains are wont to do. 

Fucking goddamn things'll imagine fricking anything. Plus, because they are lazy on top of everything else that is wrong with them--cuntivorous and cocktivorous to the detriment of the psyche and the species, for instance--they will tend to repeat what they have seen before. So everything is still full-blown animal shit, even though by nature of iterating complexities and fractal growth it seems very different to the casual observer.

"Of course I am not a monkey! Look at my top hat! The top hat is a symbol--it shows that I am smart and beautiful, a god! I made a machine to think for me and solve all my problems because I am so smart and industrious! I am sure I did a good job because, see above, I am not a monkey! I am smart and beautiful, a god! I have the fanciest hat! I will repeat this, not quite the same way, until I die! And my children will repeat after me!"

Concussively stupid. Draining. Worse, I've written it before.

But I can save myself labor, if that's what interests me. There exists one convenient term to encapsulate all this: farce.

Utter farce.

*

Must be very tired--things must be bad--because readers have actually checked in, concerned, that something worse than usual is wrong with me. 

Maybe. Thoughts of the day, related to my well-being in the here and now:

The farce has me down, and I am not in an accepting mode. Resentful of my impending desctruction, even though there is not one single solitary thing that I can do to avoid it and retain my selfhood, which is the only real possession I have--without it I am nothing. This seems obvious, but think about it. Maybe it was true for you and you already gave up the ole self-ghost a long time ago, just kept on doing stuff because everybody does stuff all the time and they incessantly bray that it is normal and good to always be running around busy and providing themselves and others with proofs of authenticity and badges of correct accomplishment. But that is farce. It's just not true that anyone has to do anything. They are kidding themselves with trinkets, but you don't have to let them kid you, though if you would prefer to be kidded that is perfectly fine.

Anyway, an impasse: there is nothing I want to do as I await destruction. All action is contributing to farce, and I am tired of farce. So I do the things I always want to do, farce or no farce: I read, and play, and paint, staying as much as possible in my dark room with the curtains drawn and the space heater cranked to max. I think in circles and speak as little as possible to anyone. This is an act of hypocrisy, wasteful and selfish, but it's mine, and it's all I am fit to accomplish.

The only thing left is to lose my guilt about it and be as honest as possible.

I am going to eat what food I have availabe and enjoy being warm and entertained at the expense of others weaker and less fortunate than myself, feeding off their pain and their pointless deaths until I also die in a futile and meaningless way.

Heidegger was right about everything. Getting raped by this farce means no one ever has to say they are sorry for anything, ever. That's what Dostoevsky said, too, and Jesus and the Buddha. It is up to you if you decide farce is farce because of phenomenology or because of God or because the truth of infinity means that everything must be. It doesn't matter which you pick because it doesn't affect anything, not even you. From here you can sell special insights by the immaterial pound or give them away for free.

You will either let everything go or keep right on having what you can get, clinging to your safety and rationalizing whatever you must in order to do so. As will I. Others will keep on wanting, or decide to destroy the world. Too bad for us all. But none of us are better or worse than the other. In fact, we are all one infinite thing.

There is no one to blame for this. No one to hold responsible. If everyone is guilty, no one is.

*

Grappling with all this along with being unable to tear my eyes away has meant that I don't even bother to put on clothes anymore until I absolutely have to, and I am just flat-out not going to get a job. I feel fine, whatever. Exhausted. Just done.

This is my new "praxis": anti-resistant non-participation. If you get it and feel like getting in on it, you'll quit your job and peaceably wait for whatever is going to happen to just happen already with as much equanimity as you can summon.

The revolution has already begun!

*

Fun post next time. Why not.

--JL

#510

Still. Knowing it's all a big joke and knowing the joke is on me--I'm not laughing. Fuck it! If I'm the butt, I'm the butt. That's archery butt, by the way. The target of the joke, e.g. the archery butt. I am also the ass, though.

Fuck it. They say you can only be a target if you make yourself one, and even if it's not always true it is decidedly so in this case. So I am the butt and the ass on purpose, and wholly embrace it. Fuming pointlessly is the sweet business. I've earned this butthurt shitty feeling that won't leave me alone and intend to savor it.

*

Speaking as a pretender to my own understanding, performing said farce is an act of steadily increasing hypocrisy. With each scrap of accumulated "knowledge", with the experience of each day attaching itself to the built-up wad of days that represents a life, the intensity and scale of one's personal hypocrisy grows and grows. Well, maybe I can only speak to mine. Maybe your knowledge is good somehow. Mine has proven itself false coin in every material way. 

*

There have been times I knew how to laugh, and nothing else. Look through the archives and you will find them.

What I need is to become that person again, to give birth to myself again before the self-inflicted labor pains kill me.

--JL

#509

My cycles of ego overgrowth followed by slash and burn operations are coming into sharp relief for me now, but because of what they are, who I am, and what the world is, it would appear that I have little choice but to go through the motions. So once again I reflect bitterly on the massive arrogance of having any pride at all.

This time around, I am preloading some of next time's bitterness, knowing that I will forget these key learnings in time and let my pride grow out of control once more. It is human nature, and for all my rebellion, all my aspiration to better, ecce homo. There is no escape but death.

*

Thee following are my own personal truths that should always be rolling around in my pocket, waiting to be grasped whenever and always. To repeat myself, that I ever let them go is a testament to my ability to let myself down consistently and with aplomb. 

• the illusion of control brings only needless pain
• the illusion of knowledge brings only false pride
• the illusions of good and evil are the foundations of hell upon this earth
• beyond good and evil, beyond knowledge, is the infinite universe, which is the only truth, and it is meaningless.

*

There is no point where one has suffered enough. There is no point where one has learned enough. There is no enough, no progress, no goal. There are no points at all. No point in, to, or about anything whatever.

Only the infinite. 

*

I point you to the unbelievable weight of the time that has passed and all that it was witnessed, more than even the absurdly overclocked little meat computers thrumming beneath our dura mater could ever properly conceive of or hold or process. Then, to the infinitely larger and infinitely the same amount of time that has yet to transpire, which could be so large as to crush our time multiplied by itself, rendering ten trillion years a paper-thin layer at the base of ten million layers that composes one layer of a sedimentary strata that is the visualization of part of a section of a moment in infinite time. 

And it could all repeat infinitely, even though it never ends.

*

It's all a joke, and all the time you are forgetting to laugh, it is on you.

--JL

#508

In these uncertain times, philosophy is the only consolation. I have looked elsewhere, and found comfort only in Final Fantasy games. Other video games too, I guess. Art. NieR: Automata is a complete review and proof of existentialism made digital sculpture, so that has been an exceptionally consoling game. Its glorious, unerring purpose is ripping your heart into bloody soup chunks and trapping you in a pointless, endless loop of meaningless action and empty, inescapable violence--just like life, and death brings no escape, no surcease. It is so fucking good. 

Also I have been listening to the soundtrack a lot. Consoling stuff. 2-B's ass is also admittedly consoling in the extreme, which is very funny when you think about it. The game is filled with great jokes and profound beauties and pleasures. This does not blunt its slow, merciless edge, nor soften its killing blows in the slightest.

*

Never been able to nor ever sincerely wished to separate philosophy from art, nor art from philosophy. Both are life; not its purpose, not its meaning, but literally all there is to and within life. This beingness, this world-aperture that perceives the infinite universe, is art, is philosophy. The act of creation-perception that has been my embodiment and the chronophenomenon it has occupied--my body on the world, in history, acting out its part in a story on a stage which is the art philosophic, the life of the world.

*

It's a trip, as they say. All there is is to ride it out.

--JL

#507

Well, I guess the ride is over. The ride, in this case, is--I am pretty sure--having Factually Pointless scraped by foreign crawlers a thousand times a day or better. Specifically but not limited to hits coming out of Sinagapore and Hong Kong. This started when I made the crude mistake of using reddit--yes, pathetic, cringing, sad of me--to try and boost a few pieces, get a new reader or two. Being unemployed can often lead me into these terrible, incautious, and bad-aesthetic decisions. This did not prove efficacious in a real sense, but in a different sense, it certainly made the numbers go up. Now they are zero, at least on new posts; looks like scrapers are still sneaking into the old ones.

The end of the tale, such as it is, came in the form of a couple hits from what appeared to be a google admin, followed by a dramatic throttling of this false and likely pernicious traffic. I've done a bit of research and it seems difficult to keep hungry crawlers out of your stuff, and this is, in a very real sense, google's stuff I'm typing for them. Right? It's not like I don't have certain rights and responsibilities as regards the content of these text fields, but also, google hosts them and has its own rights and duties and best practices. So thank you, google admin, be ye organism or daemon. It was fun to pretend that my blog was useful to somebody for something, but it's definitely less creepy now that everything is back to normal.

Normal, I am now convinced, consists of random pings and a single friend. I think even those are gone now. My blog is zero views for the last three posts now.

Seemingly in contrast to what I say about the product of LLMs, I don't really care if my work gets scraped or by whom, really, but I guess I'd rather whoever has a more ostensible claim to the rights of it get the benefits. But who really knows whose rights are whose? Not my fight, not my problem. Just hope google itself is getting some value out of all my labor. I guess value for anyone is something more than nothing, which is basically what I get out of it beyond the intrinsic and sufficient value of typing all this to amuse myself. 

In perfect isolation, it would seem. Here, on the vast and thrumming net, it would appear that, identically to out there in meatspace, I am but a man without a country, allowed to take up space and fill certain voids in the absence of an observer effect. Which is cool by me, and if it isn't, I ought to make peace with it, eh?

*

Man, I hope no unsuspecting sap tries to learn English from anything trained on my words. To put it lightly: I did not, assuredly not, attend Oxford college. You are not going to want to show someone you speak English with the shit I put out. I write specifically to piss off form/grammar cops, bosses, and government officials. You fucked up; unless you want to sound like a fevered, spasmoidal ululator on a mission to become completely impenetrable to anyone with clout or decent sense.

--JL

#506

As is, I suppose, traditional at this stage in the life of things, it is time to print some clarifications, adjustments, and modulations on prior positions after writing several posts in an emotive state unbecoming of the site's masthead.

*

To be penetratingly simple and clear: if it pleases you to generate artefacts on an LLM, if it helps you do tasks, if its use removes barriers that were a legitimate hindrance, and even if you're a lazy piece of shit who is literally laughing at me and flipping me the bird, use AI however you want, for whatever you want to use it. No part of that affects me in the slightest, near as I can tell, and I did not mean to attach moral significance to the choice. What I wanted to communicate was merely that it seems to me that this allegedly liberatory project is a scam, not on me, not really on society or power or capital or anything, but on the user. Like, I don't see how it helps you and I can definitely see how it harms and robs you. Also I have sampled a broad range of comics and art produced on LLMs by a variety of individuals and indeed I cannot see how you are not simply stealing labor in order to waste time. Sorry. Gotta call it as I see it--but again, who cares, don't stop on my account, prove me wrong.

*

Truly I have no business ever talking about politics in the moment. Just because it doesn't stop any other mouth-breather doesn't mean I have to make the same mistake. It's nothing personal. It is not my duty nor is this blog a truly suitable record of anything except the hideous contortions of my ego.

The truth is I don't know what is good or bad or how anything will shake out. The truth is I don't know jack or shit about fuck or dick, actually. Don't count on me if you know how to count. I keep forgetting that this is so and going through this shit again and again, but dammit, may it please take hold this time.

*

A cleanser for the palate! A shot of something resinous and 120-proof to cut through our system. 

Yes! Yes! Lists! The true purpose of Factually Pointless. Have a dash of them! A salting! A peppering! A smorgasboard! A variety platter! 

Alright okay. Ok cool. Here we go.

*

One of the clearest signs that something is fundamentally at issue in the core of my being is that I read much fewer honest-to-god physical books. There's always ups and downs in how many books I get through based on the influx of other media and the tides and vicissitudes of life, but the last long while has been particularly not-much and very other-stuff heavy. Still, even though I have not managed to complete O. Wilson's excellent Consilience, I have started and finished a few other books, and a veritable pile of comics. Follows an account of all such as I am able to dredge from the memory. Hasn't been that long since I hitcha with the lists, but somehow I do get through things.

books I have started and not finished in addition to Consilience

Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, Edwin A. Abbott

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl, reread, aloud to Ezra as a pastime especially before bed or driving someplace

books I have managed to start and finish since they're fewer than a hundred pages long and filled with illustrations

George's Marvelous Medicine, Roald Dahl, reread for maybe the seventieth time (Roald Dahl childhood 100, Roald Dahl teenager and adult 100, all the stuff, every scrap and bit a person can find, I have read it multiple times)

Solutions and Other Problems, Allie Brosh (wow this is one of the funniest persons ever to have drawn breath and shown their work. Also profoundly courageous, or, persistent, which hits the same)

Who knows how many Star Wars books I forgot to put into the record, honestly, what a buffoon

print comics, usually from the library

completed:

The Last Delivery, Evan Dahm (genius)

Funny Things: A Comic Strip Biography of Charles M. Schulz, Francesco Matteuzzi and Luca Debus

Where I'm Coming From: Selected Strips 1991-2005, Barbara Brandon-Croft

Batman: White Knight, Sean Murphy

Batman vol. 1: The Court of Owls, Scott Snyder

Miles Morales Spider-Man vol. 1: Trial by Spider, Cody Ziglar

same category, forgotten from last summer:

Social Fiction, Chantal Motellier

Special Exits: A Graphic Memoir, Joyce Farmer

comics in progress:

This Is How I Disappear, Mirion Malle

webcomics I have read from start to finish, caught up on, or revisited from long ago lately--who knows which! Me, but I really don't wanna type all that shit out right now. I want to be done with this so I can shove my unemployed ass into the bed and raise digital pocket monsters.

Kill Six Billion Demons, Abbadon

Bobbins/Solver/Steeple, John Allison

Sam and Fuzzy, Sam Logan

Dumbing of Age, David Willis

Yellow Brick Ramble, Daisy McGuire

Dresden Codak, A. Senna Diaz

Elephant Town, Danielle Corsetto

*

OK! Okay okay all right now woo woo wooooo

--JL

#505

Yes, I took to bed on April first, completely in the grip of that illness called despair. Everything became very personal, you see. Everything so personal it was impossible to turn my hand or mind to anything constructive or pleasurable. Only to lie exhaustedly and think myself three hundred miles per hour into a delirious passion of hurt and rage and personal blame. 

What I forgot is that we are all guilty before one another, there is no one and nothing to blame, and the universe unfolds as it unfolds. That it is not personal. That I have no enemies, and we know not what we do. That this world is a violence and a charnel house precisely because we seek to control and blame and act as though we know what is best and what would have been better when we know nothing, nothing.

I forgot, as is so easy to do, that I know nothing. That perceiving hurt at the hands of others is a mistake--it is all just me hurting myself, them hurting themselves, for we are not, in fact, separate entities, but aspects of the godhead, a oneness and a completeness whose distinction is an illusion. 

But despair is only an illness. The worst, but just a passing thing. Here I am. Do with me as thou wilt.

Thank you, Kierkegaard, thank you Nietzsche, thank you Socrates, thank you all the rest. Truly the only consolation lies in philosophy and the contemplation/(re)discovery[immanence/transcendence] of the infinite universe/incomprehensible (smokeless flame, lossless radiance) mind of God.

That's what's important, mang.

*

Back to the vital business of being factually pointless. It is so off-brand of me to act like I should have a point. Must try to remember to remedy this tendency with maximum prejudice as I approach the next four hundred and ninety-four posts.

*

I better take a walk. Peace. As in, really.

Peace.

Also remembered this, yesterday; speaking of sublime consolation:

memento et mori

caro temporalis est

facta aterna



--JL

#504

If I worked really hard at this, harder than before, I could hit one thousand posts in about three and a half years, optimistically. Daily posting, of course, would make it about a year and about a quarter, but that is less than realistic, probably. 

Well, time will tell us what it has in store for us day by day.

Day by day by grinding, painful, all-too-incremental and seemingly infinite day. Yet pass they do, vanishingly swift, irretrievable.

*

Spent most of the day before yesterday either pacing frantically or in bed, stark naked either way, thinking the worst thoughts my brain knows how to think. The fucked shit. The tentacular, overhwelming, viscous, poisonous demon shit you see surging and writhing against all that is good and true in this world, chewing and spewing and struggling like a diseased rat inside my skull. I guess before it got bad, I got the post written, which is something.

Very rare indeed that I would take a day to the backyard by the collar and part its body from its life to the hollow boom of a shotgun, but sometimes one is simply powerless to resist the full-body grip of the shadowself and must know the bitter, oily taste of pure defeat. My better angel beat a full retreat, and I had no stick with which to beat the devil down.

Today feels more natural, except I'm tired like I ran ten miles too far yesterday, instead of mostly lying down fitfully. Also residual thoughts and feelings from yesterday include visualizing the choking black soot that will coat this fully ruined planet like a grave shroud. 

As a fossil enthusiast, I do not mind this in the abstract, as I can better hope that whatever historians, scientists, and philosophers of whichever species might unearth this cursed and haunted strata may find me and use my bits to teach themselves something interesting about the past.

*

God, and learn. Pray that someone, anyone, sometime, on this blasted, accursed, beautiful and weary space rock, has learned anything. For example, in my self-inflicted total suffering, I learned something, or remembered it. Shall elaborate next post.

--JL

#503

Poking around the onlines, it becomes clear how some extremely clever fuck, a pastiche of LLM-adopters (indistinguishable at times from the tools they no doubt used to assist in the composition of their rhetorical volleys), could easily be all "how can you hate AI when it helps disabled people reach for their dreams? ableist much? also you are a gatekeeper" when reacting to ideas along the lines of yesterday's post.

Which might scare some teenagers and the feckless, who have not had much time to really, truly think about their convictions or lack the conviction to have convictions in the first place. Being well past grown, though, and having worked and lived with disabled artists my entire adult life, I know that this is more than likely a clever rhetorical maneuver rather than any particular concern for disabled people and their access. Disabled or differently-abled people are known for their artistry perhaps to the point of being stereotyped about it. Have I listened to a diverse range of disabled artists tell me about some of their challenges across a broad range of challenges and disciplines? Have I marveled at their resourcefulness, patience, vitality, and ingenuity in creating art whenever possible, however possible? To the point of exhaustion, frankly. So the prior lack of LLM assistance has not been a real barrier as you are framing it, out where people are actually making art. 

The entire point of what I was saying is that the only gates are in your mind. I am not the one putting gates anywhere! This I swear. Barriers, gates, elitism, your perception of "writer's privilege"--what the fuck?--this is all literally in your own mind. Well, they are real as it relates to the acquisition of capital, clout, whatever else, but nothing can stop you from writing.

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Maybe you should get an LLM to read my last post for you and reframe it for you in a way that is best and most accessible for you. 

See? I am in fact extremely open to using technology to bridge an ability gap. And not literally like the bad guy from the first Incredibles movie, which is what you guys all seem like when you talk. How that isn't a massively viral meme yet, I'll never know. It's exactly the kind of cheesy dotted line people love to draw and beat to death. Maybe it happened and I missed it. Maybe the movie was a response to the discussion in the first place. I digress. Movies are very good. Syndrome is the guy. Man. The parallel really is kind of absurdly on-point. 

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Anyway! Whole moral is that if you suck, the LLM can't help you. That's what you can't talk your way around and that is what infuriates you. That people aren't falling to their knees in order to suck your dick because you "beat" "writer's privilege". That the problem, as I have stated and as unfortunately cannot be avoided, lies within.

What the fuck, yo? What the hell are you talking about? If you can type the words "writer's privilege", then in fact, you have that. It's called literacy. I kind of wish you were using it better! Also have some fucking dignity.

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Fun fact: wrote this yesterday. It just didn't seem like the right April Fool's Day to post anything at all. Man, that so-called holiday really grates my ass.

--JL