Musings

I won’t be using generative AI on this website. I won’t be using generative AI on my phone. I won’t be using generative AI on my personal computer. I’ve been trying to collect my thoughts on generative AI for months. I can’t seem to write something that I’m completely happy with. So I’m going to post this as-is. All opinions are a work in progress. For the rest of this article assume AI means generative AI.

At the start of this year, I decided to take up the “No Buy Year Challenge” that got popular on YouTube around New Years. More specifically I went for the “Low Buy” variant. If you’re not familiar, the challenge is to go a whole year without buying anything, outside of a few predetermined exceptions like food and toiletries. I found out about the idea from this video by Grace Nevitt, but there are a ton of other videos out there.

In this case the main message - “nothing changes if nothing changes” - a call to actively engage in your own life - is something I needed to hear. It is an excellent shorthand phrase for a theme I’ve seen before but often forget. “People have to save themselves. One person saving another is impossible.” -Meme Oshino, Bakemonogatari While the “nothing changes” version of the message is excellent branding and shorthand for the concept, It undersells the problem.

I’ve been struggling a lot with my identity lately. The eternity of 2020 has done a lot to push mortality into the minds of everyone. But I also feel that I’ve been experiencing a heightened push in that regard from other angles as well. We watched Breaking the Rules, which was really not very good, but did make me think. Then I got the kidney stone over the holidays, which, while not life threatening, kind of put my life on pause for a month.

Haibane Renmei is an anime I return to again and again. There’s an idea introduced in the first few episodes that resonates with me far outside the bounds of the show: The main characters are restricted to only own items that are used. I never finished the show. So I never learned why this limitation is placed on the Haibane. The more important thing for me is that this limitation sounds like an interesting guideline for myself.

I haven’t written anything here in quite a while. Work got crazy and my house projects got intense. I guess I haven’t yet figured out how to make blogging a core part of my routine. Since I last wrote a lot has happened! I attended Colossalcon, which was great! My panel proposal for Matsuricon got accepted. So I need to start preparing that…

We’re all finding that the war for our attention is difficult to deal with. This is a key piece to the modern realization of the cyberpunk dystopias promised to us. I’m constantly fighting and losing against the advertisements and feeds and algorithms. Even the things I like are run in such a way that they are as addicitive as possible. They have to be in order to compete with everything else.