nokko

the not sideblog

[ghostlyschizophrenic]

i must not google my symptoms

googling my symptoms is the mind-killer

googling my symptoms is the little death that brings total spiraling

i will close the tab

i will permit my obsessive thoughts to pass over me and through me

and when it has gone past i will turn the inner eye to see its path

where the obsession has gone there will be nothing

and only i will remain

the litany against fear but changed to be about health related OCD

[realnokko]

Nobody reads this blog which is good since I just need to get some words on a page

One of my friends says not to trust anything your mind puts forth past 9pm, and she's right, but I still breathe between then and sleeping

I have so little time. I don't feel like I do anything all that draining at work, logically, but I have so little time. Everything drains it away. Am I moving forward or staying in a holding pattern? Can I trust that I'll be better at life next year? I don't know. I'm trying to improve and friends are helping me and I'm helping them... it's all so hard.

I'm okay at relationships but bad at cleaning. Good at computer job, bad at doing computer job when I need to do computer job. People like me, I think. That's something.

Started exercising this year. Feeling better. Sticking to it. Expensive, I'm stupid so I pay a trainer I probably can't afford. But maybe it's making me stick to it. Or maybe it's just expensive. Doing it to feel better, I guess. To get skinnier, too. Not sure changing my body shape will make me happy, but maybe. Mostly I just want to see if I can. Let myself spend my late 20s ruining the body of my early 20s, I guess.

But I know whenever I've had the chance to do a bunch of cardio throughout the week I've been happier for it, so that should help. Has been helping, I think.

Is this it? 9-5 and asleep at 10-12 every weeknight? Maybe six hours to yourself? Add in a social life and that's two or three days doing whatever you do. Cooking instead of eating out is good, saves money. But it eats time.

Love my partner. But I don't think he likes that we don't see each other very often. But I have. No time. Should I have time? Am I meant to make time? Friday nights, sometimes, and a Saturday morning at least, usually we do a thing every week, I hope it's okay.

Am I just weak or something? Everyone does this, everyone lucky enough to even have a job that hasn't been casualized to shreds. My parents must have done it to put a roof over my head. Things cost more now but the time commitment is the same, roughly.

How do I do it? How do I do it how do I do it...?

I try to be good, I guess. Give money to things freely. I remember all the kindnesses I received from friends when I couldn't make rent or was between jobs. I try to pay it forward. Give to whomever needs it, buy gifts for my friends, do nice things. I hope it doesn't feel hollow. I hardly have time, I feel like, to properly sit down and make something nice. It's all just chotchkes and nice electronics (when I can) or just buying food. I try. I don't know

Am I happy? I think I'm happy. I wish I could keep it together better. I wish I didn't have ADHD. All my life I keep forgetting obvious shit, keep being an unfocused ditz, keep just failing at hurdles everyone else clears. But clearing other hurdles people fail. Spiky competence. Dumb.

I want to do so many things. But how? How can I ever afford anything I dream of? Studying in college again, or just taking a giant break to catch up on projects, write stuff, read stuff, make stuff. Money, time, time, money. I hate it. I could be thinking of so many better things. Would communism be a labour-saving device? In the sense that a moneyless society mightn't entail so much thinking about fucking money

I don't know. Maybe I should see a counsellor again. (Costs money. Maybe I'm insured? Fuck, I dunno.) Another hyperalienated developed-world tech worker clocking in with vague bad feelings about... stuff.

[realnokko]

Moody Old Blog Post Drafts

Cohost is shutting down, which is really sad. These are our financial realities, I guess. Turns out I had a few things kicking around in my drafts, this one I’ll post verbatim. (I am in a better place now, uh, don’t worry.)

It feels like nothing is worth writing about, except fiction.

I don’t know anything. I’ve lived for an embarrassingly short amount of time and have embarrassingly little to show for it. The things about me that are interesting are covered much better elsewhere.

I don’t learn anything. By that, I mean that I don’t study anything. Research anything. What new knowledge comes into my mind, gets there by accident. I need to know something for work — a thing that is common knowledge in the industry, or at least in the particular sub-section of the industry that I work in. Thus, I know things. My mind is filled with computer trash.

Not, of course, to say that I have anything nearing the amount of computer trash stowed up there to have something to say about it. I’m a passive observer. I don’t do “big projects.” I don’t do much of anything, really.

The past year of my life resembles nothing so much as a loop. A routine I didn’t consciously choose. I fell into it, the same way one falls in with ‘the bad crowd.’ It was, and is, the default. Trying to do something else feels like climbing out of a pit lined with PTFE, and slick with silicone personal lubricant.

Words haunt me. They fall out of me in conversation, twisting into turns of phrase. I shape them into pleasing constructions, wisps of smoke that curl up into whorls and spirals. But I don’t have anything to say. I just need to put them somewhere.

I’m finding that the more I live, the less I believe in anything. The future is shrouded in clouds of uncertainty and a general sense of decline. There is little solace to be found in learning about the world. The land I occupy was taken by force, an injustice in living memory that remains unameliorated.

You can see imperialism and colonialism everywhere, if you look. (Because it is everywhere, not because of some perceptual illusion.) I can take 10,000 online courses on Japanese, French, or Spanish. It’ll be years, maybe decades until hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ makes it into the realm of the entry-level MOOCs. Finding a good or even reasonably-complete dictionary for the language is, so far as I can discern, an open research question.

Words still haunt me, so I write fiction. I’m told people like the fiction I write. It’s cultural trash: fanfiction. The pulp of the day. That’s fine, I’m not here to do anything important. I write for the joy of writing it. Even then, I can’t keep it up — the real work of writing is the real work in any creative pursuit: Staying the course. I feel pathologically unable to commit to anything. At time of writing, it has been 66 days since I updated my story, marked as “Ongoing” on the forum to which it was posted.

I’ve read profound nonfiction. At its best, it reveals another perspective on the world. Sometimes a whole new body of knowledge, other times an experience I could never have except through the words of others. Essays that make me reconsider issues from ‘dogs’ to ‘college admissions essays’ to ‘language acquisition.’

I feel I don’t have anything to reveal. I have no new bodies of knowledge. So, what profundity lurks within my perspective? What is the ‘good stuff,’ that which is unique to me? Easy: the nasty memories.

I don’t want to write about the nasty memories. What remains? What do I write? How?

The answer is probably something like, “Suck it up, live life, read about diverse subjects and form well-thought-out opinions. Express them.” So I should do that.

Step two seems hard, though.

[scuhlly]

Devin Kelly, All that wanting, right?

[realnokko]

Crap, I have... takes, about ChatGPT and the next generation of NLP models.

Ink has been spilled on the various problems with this sort of thing existing - unethical data harvesting, unethical uses for cheap, if somewhat low-quality intellectual labour, consequences for working writers, dystopian commercial applications of advanced NLP chat AIs, all that.

But, for once, I also see something genuinely good about this kind of model. It's a thing you can talk to, which has infinite patience and responds to you like a sort of boring conversation partner.

I've bounced ideas off it to finally finish plotting my latest novel project. Most of its suggestions are tripe that I don't want to write about, but that it keeps giving mediocre ideas no matter how much you ask, makes it easier to come up stuff that's better than what a model can do. The best writing is rewriting, and all that.

It's also got some potential as a kind of research assistant. It has some general knowledge about everything, but it frequently gets facts completely wrong. Maybe in some future model they'll hook it up to a search engine, (implications for continuous unscrupulous web scraping and all) but even without that capability, it's pretty good at suggesting search terms for a given topic.

Its understanding of English (the nuts and bolts, anyway) is mostly fine. Its Russian is at a level where I don't think it's making many errors.* (But I'm a heritage speaker, who am I to say) More importantly, it has helped me both to translate words from English to Russian, and to kind-of feel out the vocabulary around a certain topic, fill in my personal lacunas.

I'm willing to bet that for other languages it performs at a similar level, or a bit worse. So it's like an L2 speaker* you can bug ad nauseam with your broken French or whatever, which, like, holy shit? It's probably not a "technically good" way to learn a language, but that feels like a pretty awesome thing to fill in the gaps between actual lessons or conversations with speakers to me.

I'm impressed, and a little bit hopeful. If I had to bet on it, wide adoption of this NLP model and its future descendants is probably going to cause more harm than good. That being said, I do also see the good.

Footnotes:

*Shoot, I'm technically an L2 speaker of English, and I like to think I write better than GPT. I meant it in the sense of not quite being fluent, not as a diss to uh, most bilingual speakers...

*Okay, uh, it's sometimes quite bizarre. Like it didn't know what me typing in "Врун!" meant, which is a phrase that, while succinct, has a pretty clear meaning. ("Liar!" — it claimed, in Russian, that squares and rectangles are shapes of constant width. Reuleaux's coffin is smoothly rotating between two parallel planes.)

[realnokko]

Whatever optimism I previously had about this, I still think LLM tech sucks. It has started to suck more, too. The stink of venture capital and techbrained losers pervades the whole field.

[realnokko]

Freakin' moving. I am not enjoying this part of my life but hopefully it will be over soon and I’ll have more, different life to contend with.

Beh.

[realnokko]

Had a stressful-ass conversation today, and now I’m fairly certain that I won’t be able to get back to work and be normal, I feel like shit, I’m on edge, the anxiety is back. I hate being unable to deal with this type of stuff, conversations where I feel like I’m being put down and I can't even convince myself that I’m in the right, not really.

I don't get it. I feel like I should be able to move on and do my work and continue packing up my stuff to move out, the things I need to do today!! — but I’m stressed. Bouncing between ‘normal’ and ‘halfway to tears’ and feeling shit that I can’t settle on ‘perfect productive automaton.’

I probably just need to “learn better coping mechanisms” or whatever, because currently it feels un-copeable. A situation devoid of coping possibilities. I hate that I’m like this, I hate that one conversation can fuck up a whole day, I hate that I think it’s my fault.

[realnokko]

Freakin' moving. I am not enjoying this part of my life but hopefully it will be over soon and I’ll have more, different life to contend with.

Beh.

[realnokko]

The Illusion of Good Writing

In 1999, a study was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. To summarise the findings in broad strokes: The researchers investigated how well participants estimated their skills, and discovered that the relationship between a person’s estimation of their ability and their actual performance wasn’t always accurate. In later studies, this cognitive bias was termed the Dunning-Kruger Effect.

The concept has been memed to death at this point. I’m not here to present new findings or insights into how the science was conducted, or how the popular understandings of the Effect often get it wrong – more qualified people than me have already done that.

I choose to bring it up because it speaks to me. Scientific investigation into how well we understand our own abilities has revealed that, often, we over-estimate our competence. Given that fact, maybe it’s worth investigating my own assessment of my skills.

I’ve been writing fiction for a long time, but not very regularly. 5 years ago I was writing sub-par sci-fi on short story forums, and between then and now I’ve had plenty of writing spurts. The urge comes over me to write a thing, I stick to it for two chapters or so, and abandon it not long after the initial excitement fades. 

Many people have trouble with this stuff. Writing is difficult, we’ve been new. In a cruel twist, it’s even more difficult for beginner writers. 

By definition, beginner writers haven’t got a lot of writing experience. Casual reading might teach them a little bit about how books are made. Close reading can help build confidence in the nuts and bolts of writing: constructing sentences, using dialogue tags and paragraph breaks, painting scenes with the right amount of prose. Analysis of a good novel might teach a beginner about plot structure and pacing.

Still, it’s tricky to apply the things you learn from reading, even reading about writing, to the actual act of getting words on a page. 

I can look at the sheet music to Satie’s Gymnopédies, even analyse them in terms of music theory, but that doesn’t tell me the whole story. Did he noodle around on a piano to find his musical ideas? How much rewriting did he do? Were the pieces always meant to go in the order we know today?

Some of these questions, we know the answers to – as for Satie, so for your favourite authors. You can easily find advice about the writing process from a range of sources. Does it help?

I say, no. In my experience, the hardest part of writing is getting over yourself. I like to think that I read good stuff. This tends to be a curse when writing, because I hold myself to the same standards as I do my favourite authors. Awkward sentences, repetition, poor word choice, questionable pacing, bad characterization, repetition – it all sticks out. Often I feel as though I can’t possibly write what I actually want to, because it sucks.

That leads to counter-productive behaviours. First is the obvious, avoiding the work. Can’t write? Just don’t bother for today. Do something else, come back to it. Sometimes this works. Second, there’s over-editing. Just wrote something bad? Easy solution, edit it to hell. Spend the entire writing session editing your last chapter. Re-write it. Add another scene in the middle to really fix the structure.

Neither is good for my writing. Not writing doesn’t put words on the page. Editing time shouldn’t be 100% of your writing time. Similarly, world-building, plotting, and research are all good things to do, but are secondary to actually banging out words. (I certainly hope that take isn’t controversial.)

My problem, fundamentally, is a fear of failure: “I will write garbage and it will suck.”

I read what I lovingly call “modern pulp.” Niche fanfiction, chapter-a-day web serials, writing of this nature. Amateur work, both in quality and in character, written by people who love what they do. It’s often rife with basic grammar errors and clichés. I love it anyway.

The lesson I take from my love of modern pulp is simple – “people will read garbage.” If you judge yourself by the opinions of your audience, isn’t that idea wonderful? “Your writing is good enough.”

I also edit. I’m not that prolific an editor, but I would say I have experience. When I was younger, I edited my sister’s non-fiction college essays and even her fanfiction. I’ve edited my friends’ short stories. I am currently a beta reader for a web serial author, which is a roundabout way of saying “paid-in-love proofreader/copy editor.”

Edit long enough and you’ll realize that “good writing” can start its life as mediocre trash. I’d say that it starts bad more often than it’s not. Many widely-beloved serials and fanfics are written maybe three chapters at a time, and edited about as quickly as they’re written.

Thus, a big-picture plan:

Crank out sub-par writing. Edit it later. 

That seems to be how everyone else does it, anyway.

[pumpkinsforsale]

Tumblr has a lot of problems but seeing posts that say things along the lines of "being trans is so cool and sexy actually" over and over and over again made me genuinely believe it. Being trans is so cool. You are given the gift of life, and despite hateful backlash and the tremendous amount of work and bridges you will burn, you still would rather be your authentic self.

How punk rock, how fucking badass. Being trans is so cool and sexy actually

[realnokko]

Crap, I have... takes, about ChatGPT and the next generation of NLP models.

Ink has been spilled on the various problems with this sort of thing existing - unethical data harvesting, unethical uses for cheap, if somewhat low-quality intellectual labour, consequences for working writers, dystopian commercial applications of advanced NLP chat AIs, all that.

But, for once, I also see something genuinely good about this kind of model. It's a thing you can talk to, which has infinite patience and responds to you like a sort of boring conversation partner.

I've bounced ideas off it to finally finish plotting my latest novel project. Most of its suggestions are tripe that I don't want to write about, but that it keeps giving mediocre ideas no matter how much you ask, makes it easier to come up stuff that's better than what a model can do. The best writing is rewriting, and all that.

It's also got some potential as a kind of research assistant. It has some general knowledge about everything, but it frequently gets facts completely wrong. Maybe in some future model they'll hook it up to a search engine, (implications for continuous unscrupulous web scraping and all) but even without that capability, it's pretty good at suggesting search terms for a given topic.

Its understanding of English (the nuts and bolts, anyway) is mostly fine. Its Russian is at a level where I don't think it's making many errors.* (But I'm a heritage speaker, who am I to say) More importantly, it has helped me both to translate words from English to Russian, and to kind-of feel out the vocabulary around a certain topic, fill in my personal lacunas.

I'm willing to bet that for other languages it performs at a similar level, or a bit worse. So it's like an L2 speaker* you can bug ad nauseam with your broken French or whatever, which, like, holy shit? It's probably not a "technically good" way to learn a language, but that feels like a pretty awesome thing to fill in the gaps between actual lessons or conversations with speakers to me.

I'm impressed, and a little bit hopeful. If I had to bet on it, wide adoption of this NLP model and its future descendants is probably going to cause more harm than good. That being said, I do also see the good.

Footnotes:

*Shoot, I'm technically an L2 speaker of English, and I like to think I write better than GPT. I meant it in the sense of not quite being fluent, not as a diss to uh, most bilingual speakers...

*Okay, uh, it's sometimes quite bizarre. Like it didn't know what me typing in "Врун!" meant, which is a phrase that, while succinct, has a pretty clear meaning. ("Liar!" — it claimed, in Russian, that squares and rectangles are shapes of constant width. Reuleaux's coffin is smoothly rotating between two parallel planes.)

[runehart-deactivated20240217]

“magic isnt real” — plants just grow out of the ground. for free. everywhere.

[twistcmyk]

[twistcmyk]

[realnokko]

ah wait this is my life

[twistcmyk]

Keep reading

[twistcmyk]

[twistcmyk]

it worked…

[twistcmyk]