somewhere only we know @searching-equanimity - Tumblr Blog

gotta kick this blog off somehow, here's a 2D animation I made for TOTK as I consider making another one for the anniversary (late)

importantcatpics

dracoj

what they dont tell you about adulthood is that it’s startlingly easy to go long periods of time without having any fun at all not even a little bit. btw this causes ur brain to try to kill you with knives and hammers.

notlayingroses

Everything I read about recovering from burnout is like “it takes months or even years to fully recover” and it’s like okay…. I have a weekend before I gotta clock in on Monday

wholesome-animal-images

yumcorez

komaedalovemail

i fucking hated your shoelaces this entire time

butterfirefly

for the uninitiated

sshannonauthor

What is your opinion on using ChatGPT to help you write? I myself use it for moral boosters and when I'm doubting myself and ask it if something makes sense, nothing more as I'd never want a word of my novel to not be my own. But I've seen some hate online recently from writers saying that anyone who uses it at all isn't a writer? Which does make me awfully sad

It's not hate – we're scared and frustrated. Not just for ourselves, because AI is a genuine threat to our livelihoods, but also for the next generation of writers, like you. It's going to be a lot harder to get discovered or published with AI-generated content flooding the Internet and the book market.

Earlier this year, it was revealed that Meta trained Llama 3 on a massive body of pirated work. You can read more about it here. Meta employees knew this was morally wrong, but they did it anyway, because (1) they didn't want to pay anyone for the use of copyrighted work, and (2) they knew they could get away with it, and they have. They took our stories, born of real human experiences, and used them to feed something that's designed to be able to replace us. There are other reasons writers may be anti-AI, like the impact on the environment, but hopefully that gives you some context for why writers, specifically, are reacting to this so strongly.

You've said you wouldn't use ChatGPT to write your novel, which is great to hear. If you did, I would tell you that you weren't, in my opinion, a writer – just as I would never claim to be an artist if I used ChatGPT to create images, or a musician if I used it to generate a song. But I would also gently question why you feel like you need it to give you morale boosters or tell you if something makes sense. ChatGPT is not a human reader; unless you specifically instruct it not to flatter you, it will say what you want to hear. It isn't reacting to you, or to your story, with a human gut or a human heart. To me, any praise or encouragement it offers is empty. There's nobody and nothing behind it.

As for asking it to help you work out if something makes sense: I really do understand the temptation. I'm chronically ill, so I write at a slower pace than a lot of my colleagues, and it might help me churn out books faster if I asked ChatGPT to help me unpick a knot in the narrative, or fix a plot hole. But I don't want to surrender the ability to think and problem-solve for myself, and I would caution you against doing that – not just for the sake of your writing, but for everyday life. In this era of disinformation and propaganda, our ability to think, interrogate and analyse the world around us is more important than ever.

I can't stop you from using AI. But ask yourself: what would you have done before ChatGPT? Could you have figured out for yourself if something about your story makes sense? I think you definitely could have. It might have taken a bit longer, but you would have worked it out. I would encourage you to hold on to that ability. Cherish and nurture it. Rather than relying on artificial intelligence, trust your own.

ariaste

All of this but I also want to add: OR ASK A FRIEND. MAKE FRIENDS AND THEN ASK FOR HELP FROM A HUMAN BEING. We're all so fucking scared of each other that we're turning to the hallucination machine to feed our hunger for connection, and ChatGPT can only give you a version of that which is utterly empty calories. It's like eating grass in a famine. Yeah, it'll fill your stomach so you stop hurting with hunger, but it won't nourish you, and it'll just make you sicker and you'll starve faster because your body will have to expend energy to try and fail to digest it.

Talk to other writers. Make friends. It's not rocket science, it's what a human being is wired to do. Just be kind and friendly and interested in other people and their writing, and they'll be interested in you and yours. And then if you can't figure it out, ASK FOR HELP. There is NOTHING wrong with asking for help. Asking for help is, in fact, a beautiful thing that will bring you closer together with a new friend. That's what you're sacrificing when you turn to ChatGPT for it -- you're losing out on the possibility of making a really profound, lasting, potentially lifetime friendship with another human being. You're missing out on something sacred and beautiful because you're impatient and scared and insecure.

Insecurity doesn't just vanish automatically. You have to file it down gradually over time, like filing your nails or sanding a piece of wood butter-smooth. You can do it. It is WORTH doing. It just takes some elbow grease.

Don't ask ChatGPT. Ask your new acquaintance, the one who you're like "ooh i don't know if we're good enough friends yet for me to ask for help..." DO IT. YOU ARE. DO IT. Experience shared humanity together! Open yourself to the possibility of connection! If you can't handle the small rejection of "ooh sorry, I can't, I'm at the grocery store right now and I've got errands the rest of the day," then you are ABSOLUTELY not cut out to have any kind of a writing career with bigger rejections than that. Build your muscles while you can, learn some resilience so that when you Make It as a writer, you're strong enough to survive the experience without being utterly annihilated.

fortuneaday

lakevida

i bet the pain will end if i arrange a perfect enough sentence about it

sapphireh3arts

today is the ten year anniversary of the Pulse Nightclub shooting. a full decade ago, i lost a friend and a coworker. i was lucky. i had friends that lost several people. today, please remember and fight for all those that have died to live the live they should have been free to. i'll always remember you, Cory.

studentofetherium

columns of kelp underwater are so gorgeous. absolutely one of my favorite things in the natural world

studentofetherium

these are equal parts underwater city and underwater forest

defilerwyrm

Let people grow.

When I was younger I was very right-wing. I mean…very right-wing. I won’t go into detail, because I’m very deeply ashamed of it, but whatever you’re imagining, it’s probably at least that bad. I’ve taken out a lot of pain on others; I’ve acted in ignorance and waved hate like a flag; I’ve said and did things that hurt a lot of people.

There are artefacts of my past selves online – some of which I’ve locked down and keep around to remind me of my past sins, some of which I’ve scrubbed out, some of which are out of my grasp. If I were ever to become famous, people could find shit on me that would turn your stomach.

But that’s not me anymore. I’ve learned so much in the last ten years. I’ve become more open to seeing things through others’ eyes, and reforged my anger to turn on those who harm others rather than on those who simply want to exist. I’ve learned patience and compassion. I’ve learned how to recognise my privileges and listen to others’ perspectives. I’ve learned to stand up for others, how to hear, how to help, how to correct myself. And I learned some startling shit about myself along the way – with all due irony, some of the things I used to lash out at others for are intrinsic parts of myself.

You wouldn’t know what I am now from what I was then. You wouldn’t know what I was then from what I am now.

It distresses me deeply to think of someone dredging up my dark, awful past and treating me as though that furiously hateful person is still me. It distresses me to see others dredging up the past for anyone who has made efforts to become a better person, out of some sick obsession with proving they’re “problematic.”

Purity culture tells you that once someone says or does something, they can never go back on it. That’s a goddamn lie. While it’s true that some remain unrepentant and never change their ways and continue to harm others, it’s important to allow everyone the chance to learn from their mistakes. Saying something ignorant isn’t murder. Please stop treating it that way. Let people grow.

got-zayn

Still call it out and question it ….

defilerwyrm

Bruh. No. Listen. Call out what people do now, absolutely. If they haven’t changed, call them out on their record. This post is explicitly not about people who HAVEN’T changed. What this post IS saying is, if someone is making an effort to be a good person, don’t go digging around in their past for evidence that they were once for what they’re now against, or once against what they’re now for, as “proof” of what they “really think,” because people’s opinions and beliefs can change.

The obsession with finding shit in someone’s past and then claiming that a questionable or even sordid past negates all possibility of a good present needs to become extinct. Gold-star activism and purity culture are bullshit and we need to collectively reject the fuck out of them.

If someone has changed for the better, don’t harass them about what they were like before they fuckin’ changed. That’s shitty and it needs to stop.

sepdet

We can’t change the world if we decide people can’t change.

sarasa-cat

Gold-star activism and purity culture are bullshit and we need to collectively reject the fuck out of them.

We really need to start asking where this purity bullshit came from. I’m not Christian and was not raised Christian but there has been a lot evidence that much of gold star activism and purity culture originated in of evangelical youth movements and then infiltrated progressive left-wing and center-left politics when those youth left their churches but failed to leave behind the black-n-white puritanical “you’re going to hell if you stray one inch from the righteous path” style of thinking they were taught.

I distinctly remember some conversations I had in the late 00s and very early 2010s with long time social justice activists who were baffled and disturbed by the new crop of youth activists who were practicing something that was decidedly NOT social justice despite stealing that phrase from us.

In the decade and a half that has passed since then, all of this gold-star activism and purity culture has done exactly what I predicted back then: empowered the far-right while sowing division everywhere.

Folks. This shit needs to stop.

byjove

I wish they would realize that universal healthcare doesn’t mean they HAVE to get healthcare through the state, just that it is there. You can still pay millions of dollars out of pocket for your own treatment at a private hospital.