the trick is to keep breathing

TW for pet illness, which is how I am letting you all know that the famous and majestic Porter K. Poof is on his way out, my friends.

( The story )

There will be plenty of pictures. We are going to celebrate the fuck out of this old man. He's had a hell of a life, and he's still kicking.

been a while, etc etc. catch up later. things being better doesn't mean they're great, no? had a meltdown yesterday. need to talk about it.

last week a bunch of my close discord friends started planning a trip to barcelona in june to see hozier. and it turned out that almost all of them could go. this is a close-knit group; we've been in a small personal discord since 2020 and talk nearly every day. we met through good omens fandom but we've been close close friends through tons of other fandoms together ever since them. we watched hannibal and ofmd and the witcher and played dbh and disco elysium and got into all these fandoms together. we write together. we gift each other things for birthdays. we send postcards.

the core of the group is european so ofc its easier for them but the chances that this many can get together? unreal.

poland, canada, austria, UK, greece, netherlands. six! feral! friends! meeting up in barcelona!

i want to go.

to fly from the US to barcelona at that time is already $1300 for just the ticket. the trip itself would probably be $2000-$3000. for like. 4 days.

i'm sitting on so much credit card debt. my house is falling apart. i need a new garage door. my couch is a piece of shit; my seat is completely broken. i sit on a couch cushion stacked on top of 3-4 throw pillows inside the couch because it is busted.. literally. and that's non-emergency. i'm still paying off the new water heater i had to get last year. my ice maker stopped working and i can't fix it because the money went to fixing the issue that had the fridge leaking through to the basement. i live in fear of the next thing that breaks.

my best friend, living in my basement, owes me back rent that would make this doable. but his financial situation hasn't been better either. that sucks ass for me, and it's its own issue, but the money literally isn't there.

i have gainful employment that will get me out of this situation eventually. but i'm not out yet.

i know i can't go. i know i should not add to my debt for this. that amount of money is the new couch i need. it's the garage door. it's a debt payment.

but i want to.

so i called my mum, looking for advice, cause i'm shit at emotions, and she basically said, yeah, that sucks that you can't go.

i had a fucking meltdown on the phone. actual breakdown. had to hung up and spent an hour in a crying fit like a small child.

realized later that evening that i had been hoping she would say, fuck it. go. spend this time with your friends while you're young(ish) and you can. go meet them all in one place. do it while your body works. go do the thing.

she called back later, and i told her that, and she still said, yeah, it sucks that you can't go. but don't do it. think of the long-term.

and i realized when i hung up that again i had been hoping that i would tell her i had been hoping for another answer and she would say, yes, sev, go for it. be impulsive and stupid and do the thing. and again she didn't.

and i realized that i wanted her to say that because i wanted to go, so badly. and it's so rare that i feel things. even now. and it's so rare that i want things.

and this is one i can't have, now, and that sucks. so i'm sitting here feeling sorry for myself. which also sucks.

(edit) on the plus side, me removing myself from the group allowed the remaining 6 to get a very well-placed and affordable 6-person hostel room that will save them all money, so i can at least feel good about that. on the down side, the cost of the hostel is so fucking cheap that i'm stuck here wondering whether i could have made it work after all. on the real side, however, having a 7th person would have meant they could not get the really good 6-person hostel room anyway, so the point is entirely moot.

or: Sev's Adventures With ChatGPT

This is not an article defending AI scraping programs in any way. I find their existence worrisome and exploitative. However, while reading what's going down at AO3 with regards to AI-generated fanworks - more specifically, writing - I realized I actually don't know a lot about what these kinds of things actually produce.

I am, of course, teh lady who thought the band was actually called One Directional, so. No wonder.

But I decided I would take a little look and see what the concerns are with regards to written fanworks. (Again, this is in NO way defending the way these programs were trained on the backs of content written by others. That's separate.) I wanted to see what a fanwork might look like coming out of one of these guys.

I wanted to see how - threatening? - AI-generated content is at the moment only in terms of comparison to other fanfictions. Again, this says nothing about legal use or existence as a transformative work. I wanted to see if I could make it make me a fanfiction.

So if you, too, were curious about it, but didn't want to use the AI guy / were too lazy to do so, here's my short 15 minute experiment.

I figured I'd start somewhere I've been a while: Winterhawk fandom. So I said:

Help me write a story where Bucky Barnes and Clint Barton get together while working at a restaurant and eventually kiss.

You might recognize this premise from the garlic fic.

( Here's what it gave me: )

So on one hand, I was expecting the writing to be terrible, and it isn't. But this reads more like the summary of a story than an actual story, right? Plus, the phrasings are ultimately cliche: the soft glow of the moonlight is easily predictable text because it's been used thousands of times. This isn't bad, but it isn't something I see as being at all popular over other fic offerings.

But, I thought, maybe I'm using it wrong. So I made the sacrifice and put in the first 3 paragraphs of Old Vines. Yes, ChatGPT now has the first 3 paragraphs of Old Vines in its database. I'm sorry / You're welcome.

( and )

It's basically... a summary of the first three paragraphs. Rewritten.

So I put in the 4th paragraph.

( next )

Again. It's just rewriting my words.

So then I asked it:

what happens when Aziraphale lands in wine country

mainly because I was curious whether it would find Old Vines itself somewhere, or like, idk. I was just curious.

( So it gave me this: )

What a lovely story that would have been! Y'all never would have had to deal with Gabriel.

and THEN i thought, well, OV is a relatively small fanfic i'm using because it's mine. I wonder what happens if I ask:

what happens when he meets Crowley

( And )

Note the mention of "the apocalypse" and "angel and demon" -- the addition of Crowley to the mix has led it back to Good Omens source material. None of this is in OV, which is an AU, and way way way way way WAY smaller than Good Omens as a whole, obviously -- but it didn't pick it up from those paragraphs. It knows Crowley and Aziraphale stopped the apocalypse.

And it's also still very much a summary of something. It isn't... it isn't writing what I would call fanfiction.

So what am I saying here? Nothing yet. I know a lot about writing; I know very little about AI.

I find its general coherency surprising and worrisome -- I'm so cynical that all I can see are the ways people could use it to steal and rewrite work, or fuck stuff up, but I'm sure there are cool things about it too. I don't think it's yet a challenger to work on AO3 written by humans.

I don't know what else to say about it but I wrote this whole thing, so like, idk man.

IDK if y'all are aware of this, but I've really been struggling with words lately. I'm a full 40 days behind my GYWO writing pledge for Days Written, and based on an informal expectation that I would write the word count I did last year, I'm only at 55%. And it's almost June, which makes me pretty damn behind.

There are a few things I've been meaning to talk about as reasons I haven't been writing -- please note this isn't because I think I owe anybody anything (except for a few lingering comms for v understanding friends) or that I really think anyone cares. It's just interesting stuff for a dialogue, really.

The key part of me not writing is that I've been caring for my three nieces weekly. This involves a 2-hr drive to my brother's house on Monday, where I pick them up from school (METL MUM) and watch them for 3 hours, then start / help / eat dinner. After dinner I can escape to the basement if I have things to do (and often do), but 3 hours with 3 young and very energetic girls can be exhausting, so it's rare that I have any spoons to write after, say, 20:00. Tuesday I wake up early to take them to school and have like 9:00-15:00 to myself, at which point I do the same thing, just a little more tired. Wednesdays I take them to school and then drive the 2 hr back to my house, at which point usually I collapse.

and there's a lot of this that has just taken far more energy than I expected. The girls, the travel, being away from my cats and my OWN grocery shopping and my safe spaces, sleeping in a strange bed (although at this point it isn't THAT strange), the wear of scope creep as weeks went on. 3 girls for 3 hours is a lot of overstimulation, which is one of the things I'm critically sensitive too -- more likely to wear me out than almost anything else.

Part 1: Fibro Sucks

We all know spoon theory, right, but -- a lot of the time I explain fibromyalgia and other chronic pain conditions using a credit or debit card analogy. Say you've got a card and every day you get X number of task energy loaded into that card. Then every time you do an activity, you swipe the card and it charges you. Some tasks - eat breakfast, shower - might be one unit of energy, while others - work 8 hours - might be six units, or eight, depending. For most ablebodied, neurotypical people, the number of tasks they can load onto their card in the morning usually averages out about equal to the energy they need for the entire day.

With fibro, first of all, you don't know how many energy credits you're going to have on any given day. You might wake up and have a 'normal' amount of energy. Or you might wake up and only have, like, 8 tasks on the card. And you have to pick how you want to spend them. Most of the time people with chronic pain disorders wake up with fewer task energy credits in their account, comparably -- this is why we're always complaining about not being able to keep up with the dishes, the laundry, the vacuuming. Our credit cards are a lot more limited. We don't get as many tasks per day as most typical people. Most people with fibromyalgia continuously run on a deficit.

And in addition -- yeah, you can borrow from the next day: you can overcharge the card. But not only does that give you less energy for tomorrow, the bank (your body) hits you with an overdraft fee, such as extensive pain, brain fog, exhaustion, or even illness. These things compound on themselves, too, until you've built up such debt that you have to spend an entire weekend in bed.

Recovery Days: When Brain and Body Are Just Done

The problem with all of this travel and work hasn't necessarily been the care itself (although man it's been great seeing the girls like this and ALSO oh man i'm super tired) -- it's been recovery. If I get up, drive / take the girls in, put in whatever work I can manage that day, care for the girls BY MYSELF, make dinner, etc... that's a full day. That's a full day for a parent. So even when I slip downstairs at 19:00 to relax, I've still put in a lot of work. And that plus the dissonance of continuous traveling has just ... it's worn down my credit card a lot.

The problem has been that I'll come home and do nothing Wednesday and usually need Thursday as a light-brain-and-body day until I'm recovered enough to feel like myself. By the weekend (when I see Actual Husband) I'm usually alright, but at that point I'm trying to forward-bank energy for next week's child care. When you run on a deficit like this, well -- my time w the girls is my top priority, they're my nieces, but/so other things start to suffer.

So one of the reasons it's been hard to write much of anything is because I've been spending far more time in Recovery Mode. Like, Hardcore Recovery Mode. (Fibro's one of the biggest reasons I don't have children of my own, although there are others.)

It's no surprise that the only things I've posted this year are comfort fic (forth, the fifth) and feral birthday gifts (weirdly specific AUs) where I had people cheering me on as I was writing AND a deadline. That encouragement piece has really, until now, been the driver. I'm finally starting to crawl out of the hole, finally looking at WIPs again, but.

And the funniest/worst piece is that I hadn't really realized up until just recently - when I started climbing out of the hole - what it was. It isn't necessarily writing burnout - because I still wanted to write - but it's other burnout, spending my energy elsewhere on other people and then needing to plug myself in like a dead phone. (My other favorite fibro analogy is the mobile phone with a shit battery and too many apps analogy.)

you just get tired of being tired, my friends. you get really tired of being tired.

So I actually went into Only Murders In The Building expecting to not be entertained. I mean, Old White Guy comedy really is not my thing, and while the word murder won me over for trying it, I was expecting something cringe, boring, and predictable. Instead I found it a quirky, funny, entertaining show where I only guessed the killer 2 episodes early.

It was incredibly enjoyable. I think because Steve Martin and Martin Sheen were both the butt of the “joke” enough times without making it all about their comedy — but the show also managed to mix in some deep sadness and poignant statements about relationships alongside a truly enjoyable murder mystery and true crime podcast type setup.

No more in the entry; spoilers may be in the comments. Has anyone else watched it? I actually recommend it for a nice little bite of feelings!

Right right right. so much going on:

• still taking care of the 3 girls. i drive out monday around noon, do my duties, drive back wednesday mornings. it's very tiring but i think i'm finally getting used to the schedule because i didn't hit the absolute exhaustion point this week, which would have felt good except that my throat's sore (from allergy drip, not covid) so i didn't sleep well anyway. but it's improving, as is my ability to focus on work while i'm there.
• work words 1 (content writing) continues to be relatively consistent; not the same every week, but close enough that it's still reasonable income
• work words 2! so i got a THIRD job, writing scientific and technical blurbs for a company that produces analytical chemicals for life / bio science applications. it's fascinating stuff and it's so much more like the kind of writing i WANT to be doing, so that's great. they do require substantial research and it's easier to do them from my house where i have double giant monitors, so that's the only real downside rn. not enough of it to ditch any other work but it's good value AND something i want to put on my resume, and there's a possibility it will expand into additional work at some point, so. so
• basement gremlin (my bff who is renting my basement, aka my FOURTH INCOME STREAM aaaaa) has a critical appointment with his service dog prospect tomorrow, so please cross your fingers for us and mr eddie brock
• i've been working at more frequent updates on my patreon (my FIFTH income stream fml) including early access to some of my chaptered GO fic... that requires writing them, though ... yeahhhh
• i actually am staying reasonable w nano. even though so far it's mostly been work words and some fanfic, it's still words and i'm allowing it. my actual nano target this year is still 50,000 words, but only 25,000 of them have to be my original novel (which will ALSO be posted on my patreon! if you're interested! even for just $1 / mo!) and the rest can be work words (because they take away from my ability to write other words, i'm going to count them) or fanfiction (i don't want to abandon everything for an entire month), so. so. so i guess it's 10 days in and I'm absolutely behind but i haven't given up on it yet
• sitting here like WHAT ELSE DO I HAVE GOING ON as if this isn't A Lot