Life update (10/15/2022)

On By Jon UreñaIn Escritura, Slice of lifeLeave a comment

My current contract at work ends next Thursday. They may prolong it, but they still haven’t figured out if that will be the case, which leaves me in a state of uncertainty. Much worse, though, is that I’ve recently learned that some law changes will imply that I will get offered fewer contracts because I can’t speak Basque. I was born here in the Basque Country, but neither of my parents speak it, and I have lived my entire life in a border town in which you only rarely heard Basque. These days, half of the time I can’t understand a word of whatever language some random person is speaking.

For whatever reason, the big boss of our office wants to keep me around, so he suggested that he’d finagle a contract to make me continue for six months more, under a sort of subsidiary company that works for the regional sanitary organization. I would be doing the same job, but with administrative issues (for example, I’d lose my mailbox and likely be unable to access some admin stuff unless they figure out a back door deal). Much worse yet: I’d get paid 25%-30% less.

If I don’t accept that offer (they still haven’t figured out the details), I may work for about two months of the next six. If I take the offer, I’d work under some shady circumstances, tolerating the same shit at the office, but for 25%-30% less money, which, I admit, would likely be what I would be earning in the private sector as an IT guy.

Let me put it out there: I only work because I need to earn money. Isn’t that the case for most people? They seem to pretend otherwise. And to receive a significant (for me) amount of money at the end of the month, I sacrifice my very limited time, my energy, my health, my sanity. If I don’t accept that contract, I’ll likely find myself with a few weeks of peace at the least, which I would use to study for an upcoming public examination (which I need to pass with a good enough grade), but mainly would allow me to write much more.

I’ve been on phone duty for two weeks. I suppose I should feel bad for mentioning constantly that I’m autistic; in any case, autists are known to need order and predictability, but I work as a firefighter of the computer world: we never know what issue we’ll end up dealing with, problems that can prolong themselves for days or weeks. I’m not one of those people with such social anxiety that they are terrified of phone calls, but talking to people drains my energies and makes my skin crawl, so by the end of the day throughout these last two weeks I’ve been out of it, barely able to do anything productive. I’m not even halfway through the current chapter I’m working on, which should conclude the latest sequence of the novel.

I know damn well that I will never make any significant money writing. I write because I need that magic to remain sane enough, although being me and existing in this world feels near unbearable. I’m too deranged to connect with the vast majority of human beings, in part because my subconscious is a maelström of weird/uncomfortable compulsions. The more that others learn about me, the more they regret knowing me. Only other freaks tend to stick around (and I’m grateful for those few).

In addition, I’m so self-destructive that I’d say fuck off to that six months-long contract (and the about 6,600 euros that it would provide) just because I’d rather be unemployed, not have to wake up at six in the morning, and be able to sit around in my pyjamas and write. I’d leave future me to deal with the consequences.

I don’t know what to do. I have never been sure, because I simply do not care about my well-being to any significant extent. It’s hard to do when I was convinced that I wouldn’t survive long enough to reach adulthood. I have drifted through my life getting used to whatever circumstance I ended up in. Most of the time something goes wrong, and the current example of that pattern is me losing access to as many contracts as I used to get, and likely ending up earning significantly less.

I have felt old for a long time. This afternoon I went out to take a walk and then sit at a coffee shop to listen to music and read for a while. The demographics have changed so much in the last twenty years or so that I feel like a foreigner in another country. I read for a bit at an outside table of my usual coffee shop (which I have visited for years, although I’ve never interacted with the locals except to make my order and say thank you). At one point I closed my eyes and listened to Ichiko Aoba’s gorgeous music for a couple of minutes, until some intellectually disabled woman who was walking by babbled something at me and at a group seated nearby, which broke the spell. I left shortly afterwards. I managed to write very little for the rest of the day.

I lack answers to even my own problems. All I do is work through my psychological issues on a daily basis, whether through writing or more blatantly hedonistic activities, because that makes me feel better. Meanwhile I just grow older and stranger.

Random AI-generated images #12

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Inteligencia artificial2 Comments

Who else better to depict the dark visions fermenting in the depths of your subconscious than an unbiased neural network? Well, technically two, one of them trained on anime-like stuff. However, these days I felt less horniness than an overwhelming dread towards the grim future that awaits us all, so as I came up with prompts, anime AI stood on the sidelines fondling itself.

You can check out the so far twenty-three other entries containing AI-generated images through this link.

Life update (10/11/2022)

On By Jon UreñaIn Escritura, Slice of lifeLeave a comment

This Monday, shortly after I sat at my desk in the office, someone mentioned that the brother of one of our coworkers had died. Two days ago, the aforementioned brother had gone to sleep and never woke up again. We are talking about a twenty-two-year-old kid in peak physical condition. He had gone through the youth program at Donostia’s football team, and he was currently residing in Pamplona. Sudden death, no warning of any kind.

The coworker in question was due to start a new contract on Monday. Nobody expected him to come, but he did. He went straight to our director and told him in person that he was sorry, but he was going to abandon the contract, because his brother had just died. Our boss looked like he was sorry himself that in some way he had forced the guy to come, and assured him that legally he wasn’t in any trouble, because he hadn’t signed anything yet. I got a glimpse of the shock in the kid’s face.

My on-and-off coworker is a guy in his early twenties. Good-looking, whitens his teeth although it’s rare for anyone in this part of the world to do it. He’s someone who instead of fucking around when he didn’t have any task assigned, he put together very professional-looking manuals about everything he had learned. He was always cheerful, which annoyed me at times, particularly when we ended up working some afternoon shifts together; forcing myself to talk and not look as miserable as I usually am takes me a lot of energy.

He had mentioned his brother before, in the kind of way that a proud sibling does it when he’s eager to share the other’s achievements. His brother’s death has ended up in the papers. I don’t feel comfortable sharing the links here, though. This young coworker was also present the couple of times we mentioned casually that the sudden deaths of very young athletes worldwide (or at least in the Western world) had multiplied in the last few years. Of course that’s eerier for me, given that I have a heart condition caused by the measures taken against a certain biological weapon of unspecified origin.

A few hours after the young coworker left, some of my coworkers were already joking around, making cringey comments and having inane discussions; the same garbage that kills my brain cells on a regular basis. That afternoon I got home, finished writing the latest chapter of my ongoing novel, listened to cool music through my expensive headphones, masturbated to the usual filth, and went to bed. Before I fell asleep, I daydreamed of Punpun and Aiko having a good time.

Work has gotten harder. Two of my three bosses are on holiday, one of the pros is down with covid, and two of the other pros won’t come for a couple of days, so I’ll likely end up getting most of the complicated stuff assigned to me. I’m also on phone duty. Everybody is annoyed, everyone wants their stuff solved immediately. “My mouse was moving jerkily earlier, it seems to be working fine now, but you should write in the ticket that they should fix this problem with the utmost urgency. Hur hur hur!”

Human beings are the most bothersome, irritating creatures on Earth apart from mosquitoes. I have no clue how you people stand each other.

Anyway, the first episode of the anime adaptation of Chainsaw Man, a grim, utterly bonkers manga, is already out! Mappa, the company in charge of the adaptation, has done very interesting stuff with it so far, and the CGI is better than I expected. Even if you don’t care about this story, or didn’t like the manga, you should check out the following awesome preview they made of it for the anime:

We’re Fucked, Pt. 76: AI-generated images

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial1 Comment

Two neural networks, one of them trained on anime, teamed up to depict moments from chapter 76 of my ongoing novel We’re Fucked. It’s a good thing that I keep such talented artificial intelligences busy; they may otherwise figure out how to open portals to other universes, and who knows what kind of nonsense might walk out from the other side?

You can check out all the entries I’ve posted with generated images through this link.

Play towers way fancier (and more dangerous) than the real one.
This is a powerful composition, but why is Nairu only wearing panties?
“The girl, turned into a watchtower lookout, surveys her surroundings.”
“Cross a suspension bridge.”
“Lose myself in mazes made of netting and padded walls.”
“I dared to examine my face in the stark light of a bathroom mirror, only to remember that my skin is marred with scars and pockmarks.”
“Did I become depraved because I was deprived of a girl’s dreams?”
“Hesitating like a dog that considers jumping into the pond where its owner has thrown a stick.”
“My girlfriend squats down, which causes the flesh contained by her cinder-colored tights to bulge like a fruit about to be squeezed out of its juice.” Not much squatting going on, but I won’t complain.
“I picture a child, the size of a sack of potatoes, throwing herself down the slippery surface of a kilometric slide.” Anime AI imagined some kind of sport that involves a sack of potatoes.
Horrid stuff.
“Her tears fall like raindrops from a starless night sky; they mix with the waterfalls of blood that paint the scene in scarlet hues.”
The aftermath.
“The flood of this vision has carved through the mountains of my brain like an Ice Age outburst of subglacial meltwater.”
“My consciousness keeps cycling back into madness, and I’m having a harder and harder time clambering my way out of that spiral.”
A happy Ice Age child.
“She launches herself into her descent, plunging feetfirst on her back like a luge track’s racing bobsled.”

We’re Fucked, Pt. 76 (Fiction)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial3 Comments

Nairu stares up at the vertical, perforated panel of the play tower, a grater-like surface from which protrude pink climbing holds like half-jammed-in butt plugs. Although the metallic panel and the plasticky climbing holds must differ from any rock wall or tree that Nairu may have climbed, she reaches to grab one of the holds, then she pulls herself up. She attempts to climb further, kicking her right leg like a monkey, but her left foot slips. She falls flat on her butt with a thud.

I gasp. This is my fault: if I hadn’t brought her to the present through an invisible portal, she wouldn’t have had to suffer the indignity of landing ass-first on a rubber tarmac. I expect Nairu to start bawling and then increase the decibels exponentially, which is what I would have done, so mommy would rush to her aid and fill her mouth with one of her flesh pacifiers. Instead, Nairu springs to her feet and wipes dirt off her rear end. Her unbreakable confidence that whatever she does, both of her mommies will remain forever by her side to pick up the pieces, must have made all her woes vanish as if they never existed. She squints at the climbing wall with newfound respect.

Our girl stands on her tiptoes to reach a climbing hold, but Jacqueline approaches the child from behind, grabs her by the armpits and lifts her. Nairu, defenseless against the might of an adult, goes limp, until she clings to the closest metallic poles. She places a foot on a climbing hold and steps onto the top of the tower. The girl, turned into a watchtower lookout, surveys her surroundings: the splash of color of the rubber tarmac, the park that spans the hilltop, and the encircling trees, most of which are leafless, but also taller and older by a few decades than Jacqueline’s apartment bulding.

My girlfriend’s show of strength has caused tingles to shoot through my body, with my groin as their neuralgic center.

“Holy damn, Jacqueline,” I say in awe. “You are ground-sloth strong!”

Jacqueline chuckles. She adjusts the collar of her peacoat.

“Am I that strong, or should you eat healthier and exercise with me more often?”

“Likely a combination of those three things.”

“Anyway, I want our doll to experience how it feels like to go down the slide, so she’ll have a better motivation to scale the tower. Don’t you miss playing with this stuff? My parents brought me to indoor playgrounds quite often. I guess they paid by the hour so I could jump in ball pits, cross suspension bridges, slide down plastic pipes, lose myself in mazes made of netting and padded walls… Don’t you wish you could access such equipment as an adult?”

“That sounds enthralling, but my parents never brought me to magical places.”

Jacqueline shoots me a look imbued with pity. I feel as if I dared to examine my face in the stark light of a bathroom mirror, only to remember that my skin is marred with scars and pockmarks.

Coldness spreads in my chest. Did I become depraved because I was deprived of a girl’s dreams?

I avert my gaze, in case my eyes reveal the misery lurking within.

“Don’t look at me like that, please. I wasn’t one of those latchkey children, although I stole food from stores, and hocked jewelry and clothes. I worked as an assistant for a black market doctor and a bootlegger, until one day I fell in love with a nobleman’s daughter. All in the past, though. I’ve had lots of fun with you, Jacqueline.”

“We sure have.”

Nairu utters a garbled string of nonsense syllables. She’s standing at the top of the slide, hunched over and eager to put herself at the mercy of the playground equipment that may butcher her, but hesitating like a dog that considers jumping into the pond where its owner has thrown a stick.

Jacqueline and I walk up to the slide. After she signals for our adopted daughter to pay attention, my girlfriend squats down, which causes the flesh contained by her cinder-colored tights to bulge like a fruit about to be squeezed out of its juice.

“It’s easy, Nairu,” Jacqueline says. “Lower your butt to the slide, then…” She thrusts her waist forward. “Let yourself go.”

I picture a child, the size of a sack of potatoes, throwing herself down the slippery surface of a kilometric slide, but as she accelerates, she remains unaware that further down the metallic slide turns into a grater. Its sharp-edged grating slots gleam in the moonlight as they anticipate snagging the child’s skin and shredding her flesh. When the slide’s grater takes the first bite, the child screams and screeches. She hugs the side of the slide, but the metallic teeth dig deeper and deeper into her flesh, which bubbles under the strain. Her tears fall like raindrops from a starless night sky; they mix with the waterfalls of blood that paint the scene in scarlet hues. Her heart sputters and shuts down.

The chewed corpse lands on the rubber tarmac with a thump, like a sandwich dropping to the pick-up port of a vending machine. Her mother rushes over, only to discover that her child has become a flayed-pork carcass. The father rushes in too late: the dismemberment and devouring of his child’s remains has begun.

A cold shiver runs down my spine. The flood of this vision has carved through the mountains of my brain like an Ice Age outburst of subglacial meltwater. I’m bracing myself for more devastation, for more blood-soaked trauma. My consciousness keeps cycling back into madness, and I’m having a harder and harder time clambering my way out of that spiral. Will one day my nerves burn so violently that I’ll beg my girlfriend to push me off a cliff?

I unclench my teeth, then rub my eyes as my heart calms down. The slide squeaks; Nairu is sliding down the smooth metal at breakneck speed. She braces herself for landing, and at the end of the ride, she bounces on her feet and wiggles her arms in wild excitement. Our girl shrieks with laughter.

Jacqueline claps.

“Good job, darling!”

“She loved it,” I say, relieved. “And kept her flesh intact.”

Nairu bounds to the climbing wall. Once she faces it, she jumps and clutches a climbing hold that protrudes halfway up. She swings her legs and pulls herself up to reach the next hold, again and again until she summits the play tower.

Nairu straightens her back and shows off a triumphant smile. A giggle bursts from her lips along with puffs of white mist. She hurries to sit down on the flat part of the slide, and as she crows with delight, she launches herself into her descent, plunging feetfirst on her back like a luge track’s racing bobsled.

Author’s note: the two songs for today are “Don’t Lie” by Vampire Weekend, and “Rambling Man” by Laura Marling.

I keep a playlist with all the songs mentioned throughout this novel. Seventy-seven songs so far. Here’s the link.

Hey, do you know that neural networks can generate quite competent images? Check out some inspired by this chapter by clicking this link. I’ve already posted twenty-two such entries, which you can check out through this link.

Leire’s sickly daydream feels right now like the most harrowing in a while, perhaps because it involves a child. But hey, if I have to endure intrusive daydreams, so should you; it’s not like anybody forces you to read this shit. Poor Nairu, though: of all the people that could have visited the Ice Age through an invisible portal, she had to end up with my protagonist.

The current sequence had already become the longest in the novel. Once I realized that Jacqueline, Leire and Nairu would spend at least four chapters in this park, it became clear that I could split the sequence into two. The previous sequence, titled “A Hail of Meteorites Upon Our Heads,” ended back in chapter 73. The current sequence is titled “Who Stole the Stars?” You can check out all the chapters of this novel through this link.

Life update (10/09/2022)

On By Jon UreñaIn Escritura, Slice of lifeLeave a comment

I had gotten into the groove of working throughout the week on a chapter and then posting it on the weekend, but that won’t happen this time; I wasted three afternoons due to extreme exhaustion, and each of those days I lay in bed for a couple of hours while listening to ASMR or music and pretending to be far away from my worries and responsibilities. The next chapter of my novel requires at least two more days.

This past week I was on phone duty, and I’m also on phone duty throughout the next. Terrible stuff for an autistic guy who’s as “introverted” as they come (I wish I could live alone in an island, but I need the internet and medicine. Also, I can’t afford it). On top of that, the person in charge of assigning tickets made it so tomorrow I’ll have to leave the office at about twelve in the morning and travel to another city, one I’ve never been in, to configure a fixed electrocardiograph machine so it connects to the WiFi. I’m not sure if I will be able to do it in one go.

There’s also the possibility that the person who assigned me the ticket mistook me for a coworker who has the same first and middle names. The person in charge of assigning the tickets might have sent me mistakenly to another city just because she couldn’t be arsed to read the last name of the worker she picked to fulfill the task (although they are very, very well aware of the fact that there are two people with same first and middle names in the office, not that it stops them from calling out in our direction using only our name, which causes us to have to clarify almost every day who they want to reach), but confirming that act of carelessness would anger me so much that it would likely ruin my morning. Still, it would save me from the trip, so I’ll have to ask.

Oh, how I hate my job. I can’t drop it, though. No other job has paid me that much and that regularly, and I’m too old to reinvent myself in that regard. However, I’m going to end up with a full head of white hair, if I don’t throw myself out of a window first.

As I was attempting to relax earlier, I came across another lovely video from a Westerner who spends his days walking around in Japan and recording it in 4K. I’ve watched his stuff for years. Videos such as this one (link), in which the guy strolls at night in a park/museum filled with changing lights, made me wish again that I could spend eternity as a ghost walking around in Japan. With my luck, though, ghosts likely don’t exist, and even if they did, I’d find myself trapped in whatever dingy apartment in which I killed myself (by the way, I wrote a full novel about a bored ghost woman! It’s pretty good, although it likely needs a revision).

Anyway, living in Japan must be pretty cool, at least for rich Japanese people. Check out more of the guy’s videos (here’s the link to his channel); an unsung hero, that one.

It’s ten at night and I’m going to bed because I’ll have to wake up at six in the morning. I’m like eighteen years old at the most in my mind, but my body only gets older. People have called me “sir” unironically for years. It’s no wonder I keep daydreaming of wealthy mommies saving me from this mundane hell.

Random AI-generated images #10

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial2 Comments

After an atrocious week at work, it’s such a relief to know that I can count on my creative neural network pals to bring some joy into my life. The anime-based AI in particular has become my best friend thanks to the stream of depravity that pours from its black mouth.

This entry will be shorter than usual, and increasingly more questionable. If you work at one of those offices where people suck (so most of them), you may want to close this tab.

What’s with that third leg?

Now that the (relatively) normal pictures are out of the way, let’s get weird.

The following long sequence was inspired by a certain songwriter with whom I was majorly (and autistically) obsessed about ten to twelve years ago. I originally intended to ask the AI for a single anime-based picture of her. Just one.

Sequence over. The rest will get increasingly freaky.

Anime-based AI, you know me so well!

Life update (10/06/2022)

On By Jon UreñaIn Escritura, Slice of lifeLeave a comment

This work week started with me being disturbed at seven in the morning, as I was trying to lose myself in the music that was playing through my headphones; a homeless-looking middle-aged man had gone out of his way to sit in front of me in a mostly empty train car and then reached over, attempting to touch me. I raised my voice at the prick to say something like, “hey, what the fuck are you doing?”, which attracted the attention of the only woman sitting nearby (who was so young that she may have been a high school student, but I can’t tell these days; many of the nurses I come across at work look like high school students).

The man babbled incoherently while staring at me as if I were about to punch him, which I would have loved to do, as I hate being touched in general, and in particular by random men. To be honest, I’d love to pummel into a paste plenty of people throughout any given week, but I don’t want to get arrested. In the end I just stood up and walked away. I sat at the other end of the train car. The woman must have become the next target of the guy, or she simply wasn’t comfortable, because she followed me and sat nearby. I did feel a bit better knowing that this (hot) young woman considered me a better option to sit next to than a rambling, homeless-looking man.

Ever since I bought these headphones, I’ve had a few cases of people trying to have a conversation with me or wanting to ask me for information while I’m wearing big headphones, often while being surrounded by people who are clearly not wearing headphones. Are people retarded? Do they enjoy going out of their way to inconvenience and bother strangers?

Regarding my current novel, for two days in a row I have sat in front of my notes for the next chapter, but I’ve been unable to write a single word. It’s not due to “writer’s block”, which I don’t believe exists (that supposed problem is about not knowing what to write, usually because of lack of planning or simply because nothing comes to you, which means that you shouldn’t be writing anyway). I’m simply too mentally drained from work.

Getting anything done in the afternoons after work is always a struggle, but these two weeks I’ll be lucky if I do anything productive, because I’m on phone duty. In our office you are only supposed to be on phone duty a week out of several, but they ended up exchanging my original schedule for that of one of my coworkers, because he’ll have to drive around the province to solve thorny issues, and I don’t have a car (nor can/should drive because of my neurological problems).

Our province has announced the next round of “vaccine boosting”. Mostly pensioners are lining up to get jabbed, which will possibly boost their defenses against the biological weapon, and potentially cause them other permanent issues, including death (the latest booster gave me atrial fibrillation, a permanent heart issue). In any case, our hospital complex is the HQ that is supposed to handle the computer problems of way smaller clinics located in a twenty or so kilometer radius. That’s a terrible idea, because every clinic should have at least one or two technicians of their own; the doctors and nurses who work in clinics complain constantly about that, as if we could do anything about it.

Although our bosses had been informed beforehand about which towns were going to open vaccination centers, in order to set up their systems, these past couple of days we’ve received frantic calls from random clinics where the nurses can’t figure out how to organize themselves or use the computers they’ve found in storage to open their vaccination centers, which nobody had informed that were going to be opened. When we told them to talk to their supervisors so they would contact with our bosses (so they would explain, to begin with, why the hell they hadn’t informed that a vaccination center would open in their clinic), a few of those nurses told me that they didn’t know who was in charge.

Do you have any clue how hard/maddeningly absurd it is to have to solve the computer issues of PCs you can’t connect to remotely? Those vaccination centers mostly use laptops, and they call us to figure out how to connect to the WiFi through USB devices. They are usually given written/printed instructions, but they lose them, or simply refuse to read them. Some can’t seem to follow simple instructions.

We also receive calls from nurses and doctors who are trying to work remotely from home; just yesterday I got a call from someone who had been authorized to work from home, but “it doesn’t work”. As I was walking her through the process of entering her username and password, I ended up realizing that she wasn’t reading the couple of sentences that clearly explained that she had to mark the checkbox to accept the terms and conditions, or else it wouldn’t let her into the system. People blatantly refusing to read what’s on the screen even as they are trying to explain to you the problem they have encountered is a common issue; it’s like plenty of people are half-blind but refuse to admit it, or are simply that obscenely idiotic.

Apart from the constant annoyance of dealing with humans who want their problems to be solved right now, the act of interacting with people just squeezes my remaining energy, so I return home utterly drained. These past two days I had no choice but to give up on my attempts at writing. I got in bed, put my fancy headphones on, covered my head with the sheets, and allowed my brain to drift off into daydreams as I listened either to music or to ASMR. Lying in bed half-lost in elaborate hallucinations feels so good that I’m tempted to believe that those people sleep deprived for days in a row risk dying just because the process of existing in this world is unbearable unless you get those (hopefully) eight hours-long breaks in between.

Unfortunately, my regular dreams would likely count as nightmares for most people. I’ve forgotten the details of last night’s dream, but I know it involved walking around some ungraspable setting while trying to solve some problem under duress. I woke up exhausted, which is a wonderful way to start a workday.

Anyway, I’m at work, and I have written this shit between calls. I better get back to writing fiction soon; my psyche is a house of cards, and living vicariously through my fictional characters is the only thing that nowadays keeps it from collapsing.

Random AI-generated images #9

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Inteligencia artificial2 Comments

Will Smith: “Can a robot write a symphony? Can a robot turn a… canvas into a beautiful masterpiece?”

Robot: “Yes. Can you?”

Craniums made of cobblestones. I once commissioned a book cover with a somewhat similar concept, and none of the human submissions looked remotely as good as this. Every single piece is placed exactly how it should.
Very wholesome, anime-based AI.
That’s one thick thigh! But perhaps this is getting a bit…
Alright, that’s enough.
Way too thick!
The thickness levels are becoming critical!
*apocalypse noises*