#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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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