Spanish writer, author of My Own Desert Places and We're Fucked. I have also written plenty of short stories and poetry, as well as two books in Spanish called Los reinos de brea and Los dominios del emperador búho.
This morning I woke up from a troubling dream to find that the vision of my right eye was compromised: a tangle of fibers shifted at the center of my vision, along with a myriad little dots that swam like particles in a fish tank. Then I remembered: yesterday I suffered a torn retina, as recounted in this post.
I try to be productive, according to my definitions of productivity, even in my off days and in the holidays, so I sat at my computer and continued working on a new song. I plan on alternating between producing scenes of my ongoing novel We’re Fucked (latest chapter being number 127) and songs of my ongoing musical saga Odes to My Triceratops. I’ve already written the lyrics for the new song, and I was going through my enormous list of instruments that could be used, when I realized I could no longer focus on the task. Instead I decided to remaster one of my earlier songs, but I discovered that I really, really wasn’t in the mood for that. So I climbed into bed, pulled the bedclothes over my head and let my mind drift into its fantasies while listening to mommy ASMR.
I almost wasted the afternoon in bed, but I decided to take a walk in the nearby woods as usual. Turns out that the damage to my vision is more notorious in the sun: the layer of fibers that float at the center messes with my depth perception. Given how my life has been so far, of course I had ended up with my vision damaged; one of the few things I was looking forward to was buying a new graphics card and a VR headset once the next generation rolls out, so I could lose myself in those experiences. But unless this shit in my vision clears out, I won’t be able to properly enjoy that.
The doctor who operated on my retina didn’t add a mention of my diagnosis nor that operation to my patient history, which I can access online. I don’t know what the fuck he was thinking, given that he’s obligated to do so. On Monday I will get a call from my general practitioner about how to move forward, and I’ll have to explain that I was diagnosed with a torn retina and I was operated for it on the spot, even though there’s no proof on the records. It’s just been issue after issue, both in my personal life, mainly with my health, and at work.
I’m in a bad mood. Not proper depression, because that’s mainly biological and can hit whenever it pleases, but I’ve certainly been pushed a step further down the path of “I don’t give a fuck about anything,” and this last decade or so I’ve ventured very far down that path. Life has been consistent in proving to me that everything will go wrong, and that no matter how hard I try, not only it won’t amount to anything, but I will also get a “nope, and furthermore…” kind of resolution. I’m nearing forty. My mother, last month, mentioned in one of her careless, near senile comments that I’m in the best part of my life (to be fair, she has said that for the three decades of my life so far). I thought, “Shit, if this is the best that life has to offer, I don’t want to see what’s ahead.”
I was moderately entertained this afternoon by progressing a bit on the mangas I’m reading through, and now I’ll continue working on a new song. A pleasant enough Saturday, I suppose, much more pleasant than next Saturday, half of which I’ll spend at work. Anyway, for whatever reason, I was compelled to write this entry, so that’s what I’ve done. See ya, turds.
EDIT: as I’ve been doing recently, I’ve fed this post to the Google AI thing that generates podcasts out of your material. Check it out.
It feels like I’ve just posted an entry of this series, but here comes the next one! The previous entry recounted how I had ended up in the ER with a diagnosis of hemiplegic migraine. As they performed tests on these poor eyes of mine, to discard possible damage, they did in fact find damage in my right eyeball: my vitreous gel had detached. The doctor wasn’t sure whether that had happened years, months, or weeks earlier. Anyway, she told me that I should be careful, because it could develop into retinal tears or retinal detachment.
Yesterday I started feeling that another migraine was coming. Given that I no longer experience regular migraines since I started taking beta-blockers for my poor heart, this was probably yet another episode of the dreaded hemiplegic migraine. I experienced a weird pressure behind my right eyeball as well as in that temple, and I felt some nausea. I also made bizarre errors at work that I can’t explain; in the worst case, I accidentally mixed the data of a user I was creating with my own data, which left me unable to access the intranet. I still don’t know how that happened, because as far as I know, it should have been impossible.
This morning, as I finished writing the latest entry of my ongoing novel We’re Fucked, a conspicious black filament suddenly appeared in my right eye’s vision. When I shifted my gaze, it moved like thin kelp in the sea. I’m familiar with floaters from my previous detached vitreous gel, but this was a new artifact in my deteriorating vision. And, as I came to learn, just the beginning. The vision of my right eye worsened: the couple of blurry dots turned into a myriad, the thin kelp-like fibers became a tangled mass right in the center of my vision. Soon enough, it felt like I was looking through the water of a fish tank that hasn’t been cleaned in a while. This wasn’t a migraine, but a physical defect in my eye, one that was worsening by the minute.
I hurried to the ER. A couple of tests later, they confirmed that I’ve developed a tear in my right retina, and it was necessary to patch it up with laser to block further deterioration. The doctor was young, in his early twenties. He didn’t explain basically anything about the procedure or what steps I should take to recover from it. He didn’t even give me a report, which I’m pretty sure they’re obligated to do. Anyway, he sat me in front of some contraption with a built-in laser, he numbed my right eyeball with some drops, and pressed some crystal thing to my cornea. Shortly after, I learned how it feels to have a laser stitch the inside of your eyeball. Every flash of red light was accompanied with a gnawing sensation in the middle of a very delicate organ. Manly tears of pain streamed down my face. If I had retained a sense of humor at that moment, I might have imagined myself receiving a demon eye from Kishirika Kishirisu. Alas, I wasn’t in the mood, because my body has been breaking down steadily, in strange ways, these last three or so years. I’m exhausted and pissed off.
Worse yet, although the laser, with its biting, burning ways, has likely prevented further deterioration, what I can see from my right eyeball at the moment (my pupil is still dilated, and I’m not wearing that contact lens) suggests that the floaters that had seeped in from my retina or whatever have found a permanent residence there, and the vision of that eyeball is permanently fucked.
After that young doctor finished messing with my eyeball, he left me seated at the waiting room, right after telling me that I should have no problem going to work (I’m working the afternoon shift). The guy disappeared. After I regained some sense of self, I looked for him again, but couldn’t find him. I wanted to know if I could put on the contact lens, and if I needed to do something specific to recover from the ordeal. A nurse informed me that my right eyeball should be able to tolerate a contact lens. She also pulled me aside and cleaned the residue from the sticky numbing drops, which apparently looked like white splotches. So on top of the humiliation that my right eyeball subjected me to, I must have looked as if someone came in my face. I’m living my best possible life.
Anyway, I’m at work right now. I have informed my boss that I’m not supposed to lift weights nor do any strange movements for about two weeks, which could be a problem; we are sometimes told to move computers and printers around, or at least crawl under tables to push the ends of cables into wall sockets. Now I can only anticipate in what bizarre way my health will deteriorate in the upcoming years, until get tired of this shitty life and jump off a bridge. By the way, my health issues, from my heart to my eyeballs to my other balls (found a lump in there), apart from a markedly subdued mood and occasional disorientation, started when I got pricked in the shoulder with an experimental treatment for some world-wide disaster that shan’t be named. My heart started acting up that same day. It’s a good thing I won’t have children, because I probably lack swimmers at this point.
Anyway, fuck off and all that jazz.
EDIT: I fed this post to the Google AI thing that generates podcasts out of your material, and they came up with a particularly compelling Deep Dive. Thanks for cheering me up, guys.
After an hiatus of nine months, mostly so I could tell the story of a motocross legend, my ongoing story, as long as a trilogy of novels, has returned. I wouldn’t blame if you if you’ve forgotten all about it. You can read any of its chapters on here, or listen to the existing audiochapters on here. I won’t continue producing audiochapters, though, because I have my fingers in too many pies. Anyway, let’s get rolling.
In the tomblike blackness, as if I were descending into the bowels of the earth, I keep inhaling oxygen to sustain the biological machinery of my aging body, even though every breath fills my throat and lungs with the stench of ammonia and rotten meat, a stink so overwhelming that it could knock out a woolly mammoth.
A click of a switch, followed by a whirring and the faint whooshing of air. With a buzz, fluorescent bulbs flare to life, bathing the subterranean lair in a bright glow.
“Here’s why I’m constantly up to my neck in bills,” my boss says.
At the center of the square-shaped room sits a hulking mass of metal: a shiny aluminum cylinder. No, not a cylinder, because a person-wide opening curves into the device, a path blocked now by an orange gate barrier that may have been pilfered from the streets. From the top of the machine grows a cluster of industrial piping, electrical wiring, and conduits resembling the ruptured guts of a mechanical beast.
A vibration disturbs the air like a low-frequency hum. From the opening of the spiral, through the gate barrier, danger leaks as a tangible yet invisible force; I sense the glare of a cosmic intelligence beyond my understanding.
The sight of Ramsés’ face, this swine in the guise of a man, with his middle-aged features, unkempt mustache, receding hairline, and lack of resemblance to Jacqueline or anyone I’d like to stare at, would have made me want to push him down a flight of stairs. Now, though, I’m glad he was born: he has led me to the one thing I couldn’t be arsed to search for properly.
“Hell yeah,” I say, and rub my palms. “I hate to admit it, boss, but you’ve done a great service for the universe.”
I grasp at the slippery reins of my sanity like a drowning woman clawing at pieces of driftwood. Alright, how can I destroy this reality-shattering device? The engraving of a skull and crossbones flashes in my mind: my trusty revolver, now stored in my work desk. I feel a pang of longing for its wood and steel to remind me of the glory days when I was still the main character and not the slave of others’ whims. Hey, Spike, my deformed, castrated pal, apart from wanting your own head blown into inhuman sludge, is this why you brought your revolver along? But I lack enough bullets to blast this spirally cylinder into nothing. Besides, I can’t forget the feeling of my hand being torn off that one time I relied on gunfire to defeat my foes, back when Alberto oozed from the wall in all his blobby, seething depravity to ruin my evening with apocalyptic tidings.
The stench is burning holes into my sinuses, and the hostility emanating from the machine thrums through my bones, but I approach the silvery-white shell, which reflects my blurry likeness like a liquid mirror. After rubbing my chin, I kick the device to gauge its solidity. Clang.
I was thinking of asking my boss if he had a chainsaw at the ready, when his hand, thick and beefy, wraps around my biceps, gripping tightly. He pulls me backward. Once I wriggle free, I’m tempted to punch Ramsés’ jaw with the force of my pent-up frustration and despair, which would atomize his teeth and ignite the meat of his face and pop his eyes. However, the fiend’s scraggly face, a map of the terrain of the damned, has contorted into a scowl, like a gorilla’s after I punted one of his relatives.
“Leire, what the hell are you doing?! You see an object you don’t understand, and the first thought you have is to break it?! Are you a chimpanzee?!”
My hand clenches around the ballpoint pen as if it were a dagger. The notion of impaling one of Ramsés’ eyeballs seems like a beautiful dream.
“Nah, I wasn’t planning on wrecking your stupid pipe thing, I just wanted to, you know, tap on it? Maybe I detected a kink that would be fixed by a whack on the side. Now seriously: I’ve finally found the cause of my misfortunes, the culprit to this whole ‘shredding reality’ business, and it’s been in the basement of my workplace all along! I should have known, given how this place has sucked up my soul ever since I foolishly allowed myself to be employed here. Anyway, once I find a way to obliterate this heinous contraption, this spiraling gate into insanity, the universe will be safe. Well, relatively safe, until the next asshole erects their own death machine. So let’s figure out how to acquire nitroglycerine.”
“Fuck’s sake, Leire, what are you blathering about?”
I sigh.
“Listen, boss, I can tell you haven’t grown so weary of life that you’ve been fiddling with, perhaps even fondling, an interdimensional end-of-the-world machine fully aware of the lethal stakes. You simply haven’t been notified by otherworldly monstrosities that tolerating this thing’s existence would lead to the irreversible and terminal cancerization of our fucking shithole of a world. Still, I must lay some blame on you, sir, as an accessory to this shitfest, whether through incompetence, naivete, or willful ignorance, if not sheer fucking stupidity, as long as you feel the machine’s malevolent aura attempting to smother our minds with its diabolical power. I shan’t have my newfound family squashed by a collapsing space-time continuum, so I must prevent the end of the universe, the death of everything, the grand finale of reality!”
Ramsés’ brow furrows as his jaw clenches, and I expect a torrent of insults and threats to gush from his mouth. Instead, he strokes the edge of his graying moustache, that unsanitary ornament made out of curly, coarse fibers that I wish to rip off strand by strand. His nostrils flare as he sucks in a breath to speak.
“I should have known you’re so demented that you wouldn’t think twice before assaulting delicate, irreplaceable hardware. Leire, I’m going to tell you a little story.”
“Oh my, is it story time? Can’t we skip it?”
“No, damn it. I need you to understand something about the machine.”
“Isn’t this chimpanzee too dumb to learn?”
My boss scrunches his greasy, perverted mug in annoyance. He pats his jacket, fishes out a cigarette, clamps it between his teeth, and lights it up. Then he takes a drag so deep that the tip glows red.
“Shut your trap and listen. This story starts back in the eighties or early nineties, when the internet was still a network of text terminals for academics. I was a kid then, if you can picture that. We used to visit relatives on my mother’s side, traveling out of province. In that family’s foyer hung a painting that terrified me even before I heard the adults talk about it. As soon as I stepped through the doorway, a malicious glare coming from the painting stabbed me through as if saying, ‘What the fuck are you doing in my house? Get out!’ I only dared to glance at the picture once, but in that brief look, I burned it into my memory.” My boss exhales smoke, then continues. “The painting depicted an elderly, bearded fisherman garbed in a canary-yellow raincoat. He faced the viewer, standing in a wooden dinghy surrounded by choppy seas and a stormy sky. The image seemed hyperrealistic, as if I could reach out and touch that rough water. The family that had chosen such an unsettling painting as the centerpiece of their foyer spoke of strange occurrences attached to it: a stench of rotten fish coming from the entrance, footsteps pacing up and down the hallway at night. I didn’t enjoy staying over. Anyway, one evening, as my brother and I were playing on the SNES in our cousins’ bedroom, the lights shut off. Far faster than it would have been possible, the stench of rotten fish swarmed the room. I heard the adults hurrying to the entrance, where they flipped the circuit breaker. I don’t recall how the rest of the evening transpired, but from that day on, I knew the painting was haunted.”
“Wow. This turned out to be an intriguing tale.”
“Sure. But as I grew older, I learned that the smell of rotten fish can be caused by circuit failure, as can a sudden power outage. Some heat-resistant chemical coatings release such stink before burning up. And strong electromagnetic fields mess with people’s brains, make them feel as if they’re being watched. You see what I’m getting at?”
“That you gaslit yourself into believing that you didn’t experience a paranormal event, just because you couldn’t handle the truth? Maybe the painting was haunted. Have you thought of that?”
Ramsés’ frown deepens.
“I told you I did.”
“It could have been both electricity and a ghost. Poltergeists love fucking with electrical systems. Anyway, I see far weirder stuff on the daily. Cultures across all ages have spoken of ghosts, and depicted them in similar ways. Doesn’t that count as evidence?”
“That may be the case, but it’s irrelevant to my point.”
“What did your tale have to do with this spiraling death machine, then?”
My boss throws his hands up.
“Oh, who knows!”
“Sure, we can waste time with anecdotes. After all, there’s no hurry to destroy that thing, not when the universe is about to be torn apart. Why don’t we find the painting, burn it with gasoline, then piss on its ashes? Not that we’d need to bother, because the world will be ending soon.”
Ramsés flicks his cigarette, sending a clump of ash to the floor.
“I suppose I must spell it out for you: the machine’s electromagnetic field messes with your already screwed-up head. You’re hypersensitive to it. Don’t bother me with this nonsense about the end of the world. Take a seat and calm down.”
Author’s note: today’s songs are “Closer” by Nine Inch Nails, and “Paranoid Android” by Radiohead. I keep a playlist with the myriad songs I’ve mentioned throughout this series. Check it out.
I’ve missed you, Leire, you fucking nutcase. I hope I can get back in the groove of this story soon.
By the way, Ramsés’ story is straight out of my childhood. The original experience is even wilder when it comes to what my relatives told about how the painting changed.
Speaking of spirals, the anime adaptation of Junji Ito’s masterpiece about obsession and spirals premieres tomorrow. Check out the clip below:
I’ve fed this chapter to the Google AI thing that generates podcasts out of any material. Check out the result:
Today I’ve gotten yet another proof of the fact that I’m one of the dumbest motherfuckers on the planet. Allow me to explain the situation so you can point at my retarded self and laugh.
I’ve been working IT at a hospital complex since 2018. I will never be on a permanent contract for this organization, because I can’t speak Basque. But I replace workers when they go on medical leaves, on vacation, or when the bosses call in reinforcements for some project or general disaster (my longest uninterrupted period of work in my life happened during the covid heights). I’ve never taken vacation days, in this job or any other. I was under the impression that I got paid for those days, because it said so on my paysheets. And I’m not one to go on trips like your average Instagram girl, or do anything in particular during the holidays. After all, my sole purpose with working is to earn as much money as possible, so I gladly sacrificed vacation days to add more money to my bank account. There’s also something in my personality that highly dislikes inconveniencing people and making things difficult for others, which would happen by throwing my vacation days into the mix. That, admittedly, is a bizarre thing for my brain to feel when I spend part of my weeks daydreaming about murdering people.
As you may see coming, my coworkers started mentioning to me recently that if I didn’t spend my vacation days, I wouldn’t get reimbursed for them. I don’t know why this year, after six years working here, is the first time I’m hearing about this. Before I started this whole months-long project of replacing nearly a thousand printers in the whole hospital complex, my boss mentioned that he wasn’t sure if I would get paid for the unspent vacation days, but that he would consult with HR. He never returned to me on that subject. And I suspect now that he was always aware that I couldn’t reimburse my vacation days, and the fact that I never take vacation days was part of the fact why he assigned the printer project to me, because the bulk of it would get done during the summer. I stupidly, stupidly didn’t insist on him telling me whether or not my vacation days would get reimbursed.
Today I visited the appropriate departments, and I got the appropriate bewildered looks that anyone would offer to someone who says that he hasn’t taken vacation days in six years even though he doesn’t know if he has gotten reimbursed for them. You see, I am a dumb motherfucker, after all. I shouldn’t be so hard on myself, given that I’m autistic and such dysfunction isn’t precisely uncommon, but every time something like this happens, it makes me wonder if I really should try to pretend that I can live like a normal person, at least when it comes to working.
Anyway, I learned that I have the right to take five days off for personal reasons, four days off because they didn’t count properly last year’s vacations, three days off because of the Saturdays I’ve worked this year, and 21 days of regular vacations. So I suppose that I will spend most of the two following months writing, programming, molesting myself, and possibly traveling a bit.
That’s all I wanted to say. Bye, bitches.
EDIT: I fed this post to the Google thing that generates AI podcasts, to see what the two entertaining hosts had to say about it. Thank you for finding my plight “pretty hilarious,” you guys. Additional “thank yous” for pretending that my blog receives comments.
Back in 2021 I wrote this short story about a therapist and his troubled patient named Alma. Man, 2021 was one prolific year. Anyway, I’ve presented this tale to the Google AI thing that generates podcasts out of your source material so the pair of hosts would do a review. Check it out.
Back in 2021 I wrote an extremely dark horror story called A Millennium of Shadows, in which I confronted some of my own darkness from my teenage years. I presented it to the Google thing that generates AI podcasts, and it came up with this piece:
You can read the entirety of this story on this site, starting from the first chapter.
For once, this isn’t an isekai: the story is set long in the future, after some apocalypse about which the survivors are still trying to figure out the specifics. Apparently their predecessors had become so advanced that they were mixing biological engineering with super-AI or some shit, until their industries went haywire and started mass-producing mutated monsters that overwhelmed the world. Those facilities seem to be still active somewhere, pumping out enhanced monstrosities. Seemingly the sole remains of humanity live in a megacity. More accurately, the wealthy live in the megacity. The rest of humanity (or just Japan?) endure in the surrounding slums. Among the unwashed masses, the local badasses are known as hunters, the only ones daring to venture into the wasteland to make their living. Killing monsters is profitable if they’re threatening the city or other hunters, but their main source of income are the relics of the old world: any random underground mall from the pre-apocalyptic world suddenly found attracts most hunters around, that won’t hesitate to murder each other for the loot if necessary.
Meet Akira. It’s a post-apocalyptic Japanese story set in the future, so someone named Akira had to be involved. We are introduced to him as a traumatized teenager who constantly gets robbed and generally bullied by local shitheads. During a monster attack, the guy has enough, and decides to defend himself with a gun against a group who are bound to kill him. Suddenly, a naked female spirit appears, and hovers casually toward him. Akira freaks out until she, who calls herself Alpha, explains that she’s an AI remnant of the pre-apocalypse, and that he’s the only one who can see her because his brain is attuned to the old-world networks still in place, so she can show herself to him as augmented reality. She’s not just a curiosity, though: she can offer Akira superhuman support, analyzing his environment, pointing out enemies, guiding his shots. After she manages to save him from explosions and monsters by telling him to stay put or move at times, he realizes that she’s trustworthy, and that this sexy ghost of the past is his ticket to a better life.
Alpha, as we piece together early on, isn’t that trustworthy. Apparently, for many cycles, she has been finding humans to support. All of those cycles have ended with the subject dying. In the latest one, the subject came close to succeeding in beating some final dungeon that Alpha wants her subjects to clear out, only for some information to have been revealed that made the subject turn against Alpha, who promptly took the subject out. What’s Alpha after, then? Is she on the side of the pre-apocalyptic humanity, who may only want to resurrect the old world no matter how many modern eggs need to be cracked? Is Alpha part of the same AI that mass-produces monstrosities? We still don’t know. Throughout the story, the friendship between Akira and Alpha is heartwarming, but as Akira becomes more and more dependent on her, in the back of your mind you know that she’s going to screw him over in the end. It remains to be seen, though, whether or not Akira would go along with whatever Alpha’s true objective is.
Akira is emotionally stunted. He was orphaned so young that he has no memory of his parents, and all he has known of people growing up is the need to protect himself from sentient wild beasts. As the story advances, he meets people who like him, and would even want to tear his clothes apart and mount him, but the part of his brain that ought to connect to people doesn’t work to any significant extent. Plenty of other compentent hunters see him as an uncaring loner who, despite his competence, is someone to be wary of. The exceptions are a few women in his life to whom he proved himself, and who are eager to take him under their wing and show him their delectable parts to get a rise out of him.
The gals in this story are delicious. Props to the author and the visual artist. From the teenage gang leader Sheryl to the redheaded murderess whose name I don’t remember but who was a super cyborg or something, you want to stare in awe and horniness. Thank you Japan for being you.
This is yet another one of those Japanese stories in which you follow the lives of the characters as they change and grow. Although some personalities clash, they have reasons for doing so. Some chapters are just about having a good time and hanging out with interesting characters that get along, and that’s something I think has been lost in Western stories, that are full of forced conflict and people acting like bastards to each other. As far as I’m concerned, you can rely entirely on the tension born from the story world and concept, as well as from some characters that are genuine bastards, and just have the rest of the crew navigating that while relying on each other.
I’m loving this story. I wish I could keep experiencing it, but I’ve run out of chapters. If you’re into Japanese stories with great action, careful worldbuilding, human stakes, and total babes, this is one of the greats as far as I’m concerned.
Also, why not, here’s an AI-generated short podcast about this review:
This weird thing that Google has released automatically creates short podcasts based on any source of information you give it. I suppose it’s quite useful for serious purposes, but I’ve fed it all my posts about the AI-generated songs I made for the third volume of Odes to My Triceratops. Listening to these almost perfect AI voices talking realistically about my stuff is really eerie. They made a couple of mistakes assigning lyrics to their proper songs, though.
Who’s back at work? I am! After five days of a blissful medical leave to recover from a hemiplegic migraine, I’m back at the environment that put me in the ER to begin with.
As part of the fact that I’m autistic, looking at people in the eyes and acting like a more-or-less normal human being is always a struggle, and something I have to do deliberately; turns out that people don’t take it well if you remain silent when they address you. Shortly after I entered the office, I sensed the glances of “as soon as he looks at me, I’ll ask about what happened to him.” I never engage those. And the social worker slash computer technician, whose political opinions she had expressed over the months with the certainty that everyone shares them, asked me, “You’re back, so you’re okay now, right?” I could barely be arsed to shrug in her direction. What do you care? And more importantly, why do I need to pretend that I want to talk to you, when I don’t even want you here? Does my paycheck cover that?
It’s hard to deal with anything in a job that clashes with my basic nature, and that risks causing me brain and heart damage due to the mounting stress that I’m unable to handle. Merely being outside of a room in which I’m the only person present causes me stress. The very presence of human beings, that feel like wild animals to me, causes me stress. Being in charge of coordinating the replacement of nearly a thousand printers, which has involved having to negotiate with supervisors and users that love to cause problems and complain if they have the opportunity, has chipped away at my sanity little by little, and I don’t have the tools to prevent that other than not working here. I’m basically a ticking bomb until the next time I end up in the ER, with a body that will grow increasingly unable to recover from the attacks of arrhythmia and migraines.
This medical leave has put a spotlight on the fact that the only reason I’m miserable most of the time is because of my job. Otherwise, I was in a good mood, programming away at my little project, reading manga and such. I even found myself laughing at times. But it’s not like I can quit; I’m a middle-aged man with no real alternative that would pay the same, and programming jobs are getting harder to land due to AI (not that I blame AI for it, as I use it extensively for programming myself). Hell, even before I started working as an IT guy at a hospital, I wasn’t getting hired because I was too old and my curriculum was too spotty; it’s not a good idea to put down on that document, “I lost my will to engage in society, and at times even to live, so I spent long stretches of time barely leaving my parents’ apartment once every couple of weeks. I also collected pee bottles.”
Even though I have to deal with background despair daily due to the state of the world and how it will progressively encroach into my life (my home was nearly broken into a few years ago or so by a couple of imported arabs, for one), when I’m alone in a room, left to my own devices, none of that matters anymore. For everything else, I have manga, my fantasies, and my right hand.
As Jack said at the end of Chinatown, “As little as possible.” I can’t stand the current world. I don’t care about people. I will do whatever benefits me, and as little as possible of anything else.
I recommend you to check out the previous parts if you don’t know what this “neural narratives” thing is about. In short, I wrote in Python a system to have multi-character conversations with large language models (like Llama 3.1) in which the characters are isolated in terms of memories and bios, so no leakage to other participants like in Mantella. Here’s the GitHub repo.
I’ve been on a medical leave for five days, a leave that ends tomorrow. I’ve buried my troubles and worries about my life and job by programming my ass off. Right now, the code does the following:
Generates worlds, regions, areas, and locations, mostly automatically through the large language model (right now Hermes 405B).
Generates characters mostly automatically, including their portraits.
Allows the user to chat with them either through the console or with a very fancy web interface programmed in Flask, initially with the invaluable help of the newly released Orion model from OpenAI (I’ve nearly burned through all the allowed chat interactions, which renew in a week).
It creates rudimentary memories for the characters (summarized conversations). It also saves the transcriptions of the dialogues.
Here’s how the web interface looks like:
Why all of these generated people’s names start with “Z” is a bit of a mystery.
I don’t know how much further I’m going to progress with this little project. The hardest part, being able to have multi-char convos, is already working quite robustly. It wouldn’t be too complicated to create web pages for navigation with the AI as a dungeon master, and displaying AI-generated photos of AI-generated locations. It would probably be quite fun to move around from location to location, talking to generated people who will keep roleplaying according to the background info they get fed about their world, region, area, and location, as well as their own matters such as description and equipment.
The Domains of the Emperor Owl 
You must be logged in to post a comment.