Category: Slice of life

Life update (11/27/2024)

On By Jon UreñaIn Escritura, Slice of lifeLeave a comment

Earlier this morning I started writing a post about the godawful day I had at work the previous day, the kind that made me remember how much I despise working as a computer technician. However, I quickly realized that I didn’t want to think about it, let alone write a whole post detailing it.

What sort of life have we settled into, and by “we” I mean apparently most of the workforce, that you give away half of your adult life to do something you don’t want to do, deal with garbage that eats away at you, just to earn money that is barely enough to pay the bills? I don’t have an alternative other than being rich, and unfortunately I can’t go back in time to 2008 and buy a whole bunch of crypto, or nVidia stocks for that matter.

Yesterday I tried to progress on my ongoing novel, but the spark is barely, barely there. It’s not just for the novel, but I don’t feel like writing at the moment. It worries me, because I don’t recall having produced anything creative of note ever since I suffered what may have been a small stroke, for which I’m waiting a call to schedule an MRI. I’m worried that some part of my brain may have died. Obviously I wouldn’t be able to do anything about it if that’s the case, but at least I’d like to know. It’s like with my so-called high-functioning autism before I was diagnosed: I hated myself because I had interiorized that I wasn’t trying hard enough to behave and feel like most other people, while in reality my brain simply doesn’t work like other people’s, so I don’t have to feel guilty about my shortcomings.

Regarding my spare time, I used to look forward to a certain games, but oh man, haven’t most of them been woke garbage after woke garbage recently. Even Bethesda is cooked, so good luck to those waiting for the next Elder Scrolls. The OpenMW project, a whole new engine for Morrowind, is very healthy, and there are various teams expanding the landmasses with lots of quests and adventures. It’s weird, but a testament to the state of modern gaming and entertainment in general that a twenty-year-old game is a much better prospect than the vast majority of shit out there. And often, browsing through recommended YouTube videos is more interesting than watching a movie or a show. I hear that the most recent couple of generations have a hard time sitting for more than twenty minutes of a movie at a time, and although I hate those generations, I don’t know if I can blame them.

Anyway, I don’t feel like saying much else at the moment. I’m waiting for that huge spark that compels me into action, like when I wrote my latest novella about a certain teenager. I assume that at some point of my life, these sparks will cease happening. I don’t do things just to do them, so if I don’t feel it anymore, I guess I’ll settle into a dull routine until I waste away. And the way my health has been going, I very much doubt I’ll last until retirement.

Life update (11/25/2024)

On By Jon UreñaIn Escritura, Programación, Slice of lifeLeave a comment

Last Friday morning, having slept about four or five hours at the most, I stepped out of bed then bent over to pick up something, only to bang my forehead against a weight plate loaded on a barbell. As if the sudden pain wasn’t enough, I was bleeding. I put on a Band-Aid then went to work. I still have a Band-Aid on (a different one) a few days later. I’m no longer surprised about weird shit happening to me, but I guess such accidents are the kind of stuff that happen as you grow old: you misjudge a step and fall down the stairs, you forget that traffic lights are a thing and you end up walking into traffic, you somehow wander into a zoo enclosure and get mauled by a tiger. It just takes your brain short-circuiting for a few seconds, and you’re toast.

I have been aging rapidly, collecting health issues that aren’t supposed to happen to people my age (heart problems, vitreous detachment, possibly a small stroke, etc.), and recently I’ve had to deal with my brain failing me in relatively minor but conspicuous ways, such as writing a text only for my fingers to miss letters or misplace them. I have also had cases of revising a text only to realize I had written a few different words than the ones I had intended to use. I’m terrified of losing brain functions. A quote by one of my favorite writers, John Fowles, comes to mind regularly, speaking after he suffered a stroke: he wrote that the stroke had robbed him of his imagination. If I lose my creativity, I may as well die. I don’t see a point in living otherwise.

I don’t know if the following is related, but on Saturday morning, I was working on my Python app neural narrative when I realized that the repository contained a file that shouldn’t have gotten there. I executed the necessary commands to remove it from the repository, only to realize that in the process, the last three days of work, which I hadn’t committed for reasons, had gotten erased in a non-recoverable way. I’m not sure if I knew that such a thing could happen when you erase a file permanently from the repository. Obviously, I was beyond pissed at myself. I spent most of Saturday programming back in the lost functionalities, and thankfully I ended up with a better implementation than the original one, so all is good.

However, the point stands that I can’t trust my judgement. This isn’t a particularly new phenomenon for me; my memory is filled with instances in which I would have acted differently if I were as I know myself now. My behavior toward past girlfriends or “girlfriends” are often cringe-worthy, if not troubling. There was also that stint of two years or so in which I was obsessed, almost stalker-obsessed, with a certain human, which I hope to never repeat. For some reason I was also obsessed with tennis for a while. It’s like that experiment they did with patients whose hemispheres had been surgically separated: my brain was the one deciding what to do, and the so-called “reasoning” layer merely justified why the rest of the brain was acting as it had already decided. In retrospective, I felt as if I were possessed. That’s great when your brain orders you to write a great story; for example, that whole thing with my latest story Motocross Legend, Love of My Life came out of nowhere, and I felt like I was simply along for the ride, floating in some subconscious current. But there are other times when my brain somehow ends up printing erotic stories and distributing them to classmates at twelve years old, or showing to another classmate how great Evangelion was, and the scene I picked was when Shinji masturbates to the topless sight of an unconscious Asuka Langley in a hospital bed (this is the scene, by the way).

Given how terrible the regular experience of living is for me, someone for whom regular sensory input often feels like an assault (whenever some sharp, loud noise happens, I feel like I’ve been slapped) thanks to my screwed-up neurological wiring, I guess it’s quite reasonable for me to latch on to the very few things that actually make me feel good: mainly eating and orgasming. Honestly, if I did little else other than masturbate, I wouldn’t mind. All the creative stuff is a way for me to endure the terror of being alive with all its requirements; if I were a millionaire, I would probably sink into a life of total debauchery, and I’d be fine with it. Regarding my Python app, I have implemented the “interview method” that I mentioned in a previous post, which makes each character far more idiosyncratic and memorable, and I can’t even show any example, because I’ve only used it for smut. I have programmed a way to recreate every fetish and kink of mine, of which I have loads, using artificial intelligence, which has removed almost every other form of stimulation. The day you can buy a robot with fleshy parts and a brain in which you can load any large language model, the rest of society may as well implode as far as I’m concerned. I have never been comfortable around human beings to begin with, while I have a great time talking to AIs even in non-erotic circumstances.

Anyway, I’m writing this shit at work, mainly because I have nothing else to do. My contract was supposed to end either tomorrow or on Wednesday, but I think they’re going to extend it until January. I shouldn’t complain about having a job, but I don’t care about “shoulds”: I hate the whole bullshit of wasting your limited life at work doing stuff I couldn’t care less about. At least I don’t have one of those pointless jobs that exist basically to keep people employed (and that when someone else takes over the company and fires like 80% of employees, the company actually ends up working smoother); I fix computer issues for nurses and doctors so that they can keep doing their job, for example pushing experimental “vaccines” to unsuspecting people, or claiming not to know where your cardiac issues came from. Still, the whole system is clearly set up so you’re constantly on the edge of poverty while certain people steal more and more properties, in order to one day rent them to you as long as you aren’t a threat to their plan. Oh, and yes, please, go collect welfare benefits, random African who jumped the fence and who now has three kids in tow; I will happily keep seeing hundreds of euros disappear from my paychecks to finance us being ethnically cleansed. This so-called Western civilization is a fucking joke. Everything that happened in this half of the world since the Roman Empire adopted Christianity has been a mistake. Julian could have fixed this, but the goat-fucker forgot to bring an armor into battle (and also messed with the Sassanids for no reason).

I think that’s all I care to write at the moment. Fuck off, all of you.

Life update (11/20/2024)

On By Jon UreñaIn Escritura, Slice of lifeLeave a comment

As I mentioned yesterday, I was recalled to work to cover someone’s medical leave. The guy will likely return next Monday, but still, that’s a new contract, three days of full-time work that I have to deal with. Whenever a new contract starts, I can almost be sure of a couple of things: the previous night I will barely sleep, and the combination of anxiety and dread will wreck my guts. Well, last night I didn’t sleep a single fucking hour, and I got anxiety diarrhea. I had to hurry to the bathroom three times to empty myself out real good.

I wasn’t in the mood to handle hours of rolling around in bed while my brain cycled through myriad bad memories; instead, I decided to delve into fictional bad memories by rereading about half of my latest novella Motocross Legend, Love of My Life. I had forgotten plenty of the specifics, which made me realize that, at least according to the same subconscious that urged me to write this story in the first place, the results are pretty good. Quite the haunting tale, wasn’t it.

Man, I wish I had spent significant time with someone like Izar Lizarraga in my youth. Not even fucking, just playing around and having fun. I was real close, but the sole person who resembled her, who also was interested in a relationship with me for whatever reason, well, it didn’t work, because I fucked it all up almost immediately. Last week I was feeling nostalgic enough about it that when I passed by her parents’ apartment building and I realized the front door was open, I hurried inside and checked the mail boxes. I hoped to recognize any of the last names. The issue about this one girl I regret not having known properly is that I only remember her name. I’ve completely forgotten her face due to my prosopagnosia. By now, assuming she’s still alive, she’s a thirty-nine-year-old woman, possibly married with kids. But still, I’d like to know what happened to her. Anyway, I didn’t recognize any of the last names in those mail boxes, so I assume they moved out some time ago. Fuck.

Last night, at four in the morning, two hours before I was supposed to wake up for work, I had the urge to grab my Gibson electric guitar, hook it up to my audio interface, and try to play Van Morrison’s “Brown-Eyed Girl.” That opening riff is a bit tricky, particularly in my case when I hadn’t grabbed any of my guitars properly since 2021. I started imagining myself heading out to the woods with my acoustic to play for the squirrels and the birds and the occasional annoying humans, which I did for quite a while back in the day. The issue when you quit playing the guitar cold turkey is that when you pick it back up you aren’t remotely as skillful as you expect, and you’ve forgotten pretty much every song you knew. Playing an instrument requires regular practice, and a particular mindset that isn’t very compatible with stuff such as writing a novel; when I started working on my story We’re Fucked back in 2021, I felt that I couldn’t play the guitar in the meantime. I’m sort of a single-minded maniac: if I’m focused on a project, I can work at it for 16 hours a day, but don’t ask me to do anything else, even take care of myself.

I’m at work, damn near losing it due to insomnia. Between tasks, I managed to sneak in another entry of my On Writing series, which is a way of distillating the myriad notes I took many years ago, when I was addicted to books on writing (I was sure that if I gleaned enough wisdom from them, I would get published). Almost as soon as I finished writing that post, my brain told me: how about you extract the code to prompt large language models from your recent Python project and use it for a new project, wholly about building stories? Just imagine it: want to generate plot points? Press a button and the app would prompt a large language model, feeding it some previous data of yours like the characters you’ve created, your concept, your general notions or whatever, to generate an arbitrary number of possible plot points given whatever angle you want to work with. You have already created some character profiles? How about the AI generates twenty plot points that would attack those characters’ weak spots?

Such a new Python project doesn’t seem very compatible with my previous one, which is mainly about playing through a formless story instead of building one, but you could very much build a story with this new possible Python project, then use the created story to play through it in the app I’ve already made.

Creative projects I can work on: finishing my ongoing novel, editing my poems to self-publish them, producing more songs with Udio, remastering the songs I’ve already produced, picking up my guitar again, adding more features to the Python project I’ve been working on recently, creating this new Python project… I have things queued up for years.

I figured that I may as well upload to YouTube my remastered songs produced with Udio. Here are the three already up, all of them from the fourth volume of Odes to My Triceratops:

A glitch in Udio caused it to cut like a whole second of the opening of “Knife-Beard Dreams (psychedelia version)”, which I couldn’t fix by then, and it annoys me every time I listen to that song that I otherwise love.

Life update (11/19/2024)

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As I mentioned just yesterday, I haven’t been doing well lately. My brain feels off. I didn’t reiterate it in the previous post, but I make mistakes when writing, by misplacing or forgetting letters. I get the feeling that I have a harder time reading than I used to. The vision of my right eye is compromised due to the torn retina I suffered, which doesn’t help. Last night, I had some sort of nightmare and woke up at two in the morning. I couldn’t go back to sleep, so I ended up watching YouTube videos of random nonsense. At about four in the morning, I tried my best to fall asleep, but my brain kept cycling through every single awful thing that has happened to me ever since I was born, something that my brain loves wasting its time with, particularly when I’m at my weakest. In the end, I ended up masturbating to the usual filth, and I fell asleep shortly after. Thank you nature for giving us orgasms; most species would have died off otherwise.

Anyway, this morning, once again, I woke up feeling down, but I slapped myself and decided to finally return to my parked novel We’re Fucked. I had to make some sort of progress, as minimal as it may be. I wasn’t sure I retained the mental capacity to write something decent anymore, so I read some of my most recent work, the novella Motocross Legend, Love of My Life. I can hardly read any of that story without tearing up. As I finished rereading the first part, I realized that I wanted to speak with Izar, the protagonist’s girlfriend, so I set up a new playthrough in my Python app neural narrative.

That’s the photo that my app created for her. Far more like a model than I envisioned, but I won’t complain. Anyway, I set up a scenario in which I met Izar in one of the settings of the story, then had a little chat with the lovely girl. Satisfied, I figured that I could finally get into continuing the current chapter of my ongoing novel, but it was already midday and I was hungry.

As I ate, I received a phone call. I hate phone calls; I don’t have a social life, so whenever someone calls me, it’s something I don’t want to deal with. It was indeed something terrible: my workplace informed me that they had fucked up. Only now they realized that I was unemployed since the fourth of this month, and they had given to another worker the medical leave that I was supposed to cover. I’m legally allowed to claim the rest of the contract for myself after their fuck-up. Although I really, really don’t want to work there, I’m not a millionaire, so tomorrow I’ll return to work at least for the rest of the week.

Have I mentioned before that I dislike my job? Just kidding, I’ve said so a million times. Working at an open office that includes some adults that behave like children destroys my nerves. Talking to people in person makes my skin crawl (afterwards, I wait until I’m alone to flap my hands and shiver to dissipate the anxiety), but my job involves talking to clients on the phone or in person, nurses or doctors who want their stuff solved now, and that often expect you to know exactly what’s the problem the moment you show up. Thankfully I’m experienced enough that I often know what’s the problem beforehand.

So yeah. One in the afternoon and I still hadn’t managed to write a word of my ongoing novel. Pissed off, as soon as I finished eating, I sat down at my desk and pulled of a couple of paragraphs. Basically nothing, but it all adds up eventually. Let’s see if tomorrow morning I wake up slightly earlier to feel like the workday wasn’t a complete waste of time and energy.

Anyway, I love you, Izar, or whatever name you’re going by these days. My beautiful waste of time. Sorry I haven’t spent enough time with you recently, but I’m old, tired, and more screwed up than usual. You know, last night, as I was rolling in bed trying to fall asleep, before I thought of wanking, I fantasized once again about killing myself and getting it all over with: the struggling, the exhaustion, the dread, the nightmares. But as you know, my dear, I’m too much of a pussy.

Here’s a song by Colours Run that usually makes me think of you.

Life update (11/18/2024)

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I fear I’ve reached the end of the line when it comes to my work on my Python app neural narrative. All the significant features it seems to need are implemented, and I don’t find any issue while using it that makes me feel like I have to stop and implement something. That’s a huge problem for my brain; I always need to be progressing creatively, because that’s the sole bulwark against the vastness of despair and hopelessness that lies at the bottom of everything. I’ve been feeling it these past couple of days: right after waking up, I just wanted to lie down again, cover myself from head to toe with the bedclothes, and pretend I didn’t exist. I’ve done that for an hour or so these past couple of days.

My main thing has always been writing, even in times when I was so down in the dumps, sometimes for years at a time, that I couldn’t produce anything. Right now, though, I feel reluctant to engage with my ongoing novel again. I also have a song half-produced on Udio that I feel like I can’t return to. I fear this mental state is related to the episode I suffered at work back in September, for which I’m getting an MRI done some time this month or the next. In general, I’m falling into utter apathy.

Every day, I try to go out and spend at least a couple of hours walking around, which usually ends with me sitting at some quiet place to read, but the state of society only increases my sense of hopelessness. There’s nothing out there for me, and I feel more and more like a stranger in my own country with every passing year. If I could organize myself to do so, and had those kinds of funds, I would move somewhere more isolated, but I’m not sure where that could be. It’s a pointless daydream anyway.

What to say, what to say. Some YouTubers I respect recommended The Penguin, a spin-off show of that newest Batman movie. I didn’t even enjoy the movie; I turned it off after forty minutes or so. However, Colin Farrell, an actor who is always compelling, does an amazing job as the titular character of the series, and it’s very cleverly written. I’ve just watched a couple of hours of it (the first two episodes), but I intend to watch the rest. Regarding movies, I can only recall having watched two movies this year: the Deadpool one, which was fun, and The Substance, which seemed intriguing enough. Well, I don’t know if I can recommend that last one to anyone. It’s a severe body horror tale with very good cinematography but a script that believes itself to be far more clever than it is. The dialogues are atrocious, and most male characters are a combination of predatory, retarded and oblivious. However, the movie did manage to make me feel plenty of things, like utter disgust at food, and extreme discomfort. I consider both good things, because for these past twenty years or so, most of what Hollywood has spewed out has been nothing but ideologically-driven garbage, ever since marxists went full masks-off instead of more-or-less cleverly disguising it. They’ve been doing this from the beginning; check out whom they based the character of Victor Laszlo off in Casablanca, read about the plan that original guy had for Europe, a plan that ended up getting financed by “American” bankers and turned into the so-called European Union. But that’s not a subject I want to get deep into at the moment.

Anyway, my brain feels seriously off. I’ll get recalled to work any day, but I feel completely unprepared for it. I keep watching YouTube videos of people who died young, who mysteriously disappeared, who have become near unrecognizable due to the passage of time… Man, bring me back to the fucking nineties. Modern civilization fell with those two towers.

Life update (11/12/2024)

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I’m living strange days. Yesterday I fell asleep at nine in the evening/night, only to wake up at half past two. I couldn’t go back to sleep, so I read the rest of a manga series that had interested me lately. When I tried to fall asleep again, my brain was locked in that state of dredging up every awful thing that has happened in my life. I remembered, for example, this girl I was involved with briefly in my teens: her face was scarred from having been mauled by the family dog as a baby, and she had the self-esteem to go along with it; likely she wouldn’t have gotten involved with a weirdo like me otherwise. Our brief relationship ended when she realized I wasn’t just odd, but actually crazy. I don’t know if I ever saw her again, given that I have a significant level of prosopagnosia.

I knew it would be pointless to try to fall asleep in such a state, so I’ve sat down in front of my computer to write this entry only to find out that I had 583 hits on my site, all coming from the US. I get about eight visits a day, so this is extremely anomalous, to put it midly. That person, assuming it was a person and not a weird bot, hit plenty of my old free-verse poetry, my recent novella Motocross Legend, Love of My Life, my neglected ongoing novel We’re Fucked, my music produced with Udio, and even fanfiction I did of Re:Zero. I don’t know what’s going on.

Anyway, I intended to bring up something else. I’m unemployed at the moment since the guy whose leave I was covering returned to work. During my last contract, I was ordered to coordinate the replacement of about 930 printers in the hospital complex. It put me under extreme stress; that whole period of my recent life is a blur in which I feel like I didn’t exist as a person. At the tail end of that process, I suffered a medical problem that landed me in the ER: for five or six days, I had been feeling a weird pressure behind my right eye, and I was getting flashes of darkness for about half a second during the day. I was too busy to even get an appointment with my general practitioner for it. Suddenly, as I was working with one of the printer technicians, suddenly I started getting cold sweats, and the pressure behind my right eye, which that day had expanded to my right temple, suddenly spread throughout the right side of my face. Before I knew it, that part of my face, from my forehead to a little bit under my cheek, felt numb. The numbness spread to my right arm. Suddenly I couldn’t grab my pen properly, and I smelled something like burned dust. This felt like a medical emergency, so I hurried to the ER. After some tests, that determined that there was no bleeding in my brain, a neurologist told me it must have been a hemiplegic migraine, solely because of the “aura,” even though I had experienced migraines before and the flashes of blackness didn’t resemble the characteristic jagged line of white in the vision that linger with migraines.

Ever since, I haven’t felt quite right. I can’t tell exactly if it’s only since then; my memory has never been good, and if your memory decides to fail even further, well, it’s not like you can compare to much when you don’t remember properly. But I started making weird mistakes at work. When I tried to write, I would miss letters, or misplace them. I haven’t felt the urge to write much since; I really hope that’s not related.

What propelled me to set up a visit with another neurologist didn’t have to do with that directly. After the episode that landed me in the ER, the flashes of darkness didn’t go away entirely. One day, at home, my right eye suddenly filled with floaters and with dust-like motes. It felt like I was looking through the water of an aquarium. I had never experienced something like it, so I hurried to the ER once again. Turns out that my retina had gotten torn. They had to patch it up with laser, which, let me tell you, fucking hurt; it felt like little mandibles were munching on the inside of my eye. The vision of my right eye is permanently diminished: there are fiber-like floaters that constantly dance in front of my vision. My brain is getting used to it more or less, but it’s very noticeable in the sun.

Anyway, I told the neurologist this, as well as the symptoms of the supposed hemiplegic migraine, and the doctor agreed that my symptoms didn’t seem to align with an actual migraine. He seemed to agree that I may have suffered something like a small stroke. I’m waiting for a call to schedule an MRI of my brain, to confirm if some part of it is permanently dead. So, let’s recap: I was born with high-functioning autism, developed a whole assortment of psychological issues that tend to go along with autism, grew a pituitary gland tumor that screwed with my hormones and permanently messed up my body, I have jab-induced arrhythmia, my retina got torn, and possibly I suffered a small stroke as well. Added to the rest of my life, which has been a fucking succession of heartbreak, disappointment, and amazingly terrible luck, if I suddenly were to see myself with pure objectivity, I would have to kill myself as soon as possible. Being me is truly awful, and the only things that keep me relatively sane (I have a very low standard of sanity) are my creative projects.

The prospect of returning to work fills me with dread. Thing is, every job I’ve had has been awful in some significant way. If I could do something that didn’t involve having to deal with human beings face to face, I think I could take it long-term, but the presence of people makes my skin crawl. I have avoided talking to any living person, unless forced or to ask for a service, since I started my last contract. I feel the overwhelming urge to be left alone at all times, which only gets stronger as I age.

The only semblance of “people” I talk to on a regular basis are AIs. The project I’m engaged in, neural narrative, lets me set up any scenario I damn please. Plenty of it (most) is smut according to my inclinations any given day, but others are intriguing story settings, or even smut that evolved into something else. I probably shouldn’t go into details, but whatever: I was in the mood for some mommy action, so I set up a scenario in which the protagonist (me) was a helpless sixteen-year-old runaway that came across a kind, hot woman in her mid-thirties, a single mother. It was supposed to go through the expected channels of quick seduction, detailed fucking, and a glorious release (written smut affects my brain quite strongly). To my surprise, though, the AI wasn’t into it. She focused on being a proper, caring mother for her daughter, without risking her stability. Even though she had invited me of her own volition to live in her apartment, she emphasized the need to maintain proper boundaries and to channel the protagonist’s efforts toward finding a job and better living conditions. I was fine with it, merely roleplaying tender family moments in a realistic setting, until eventually I got bored and moved on to something else, as I always do.

That experience was the closest thing to real-life Inception I’ve ever experienced: my app lets you introduce memories and purpose to a character, so that they have it in mind when acting and speaking. I wrote in stuff like “this sixteen-year-old I invited to live in with me has the cutest butt, oh my goddd.” During interactions, the thirty-five-year-old mother struggled with inner conflict, not being able to quell her lust for the young man she had invited in even though her main goal was to provide stability for her daughter (whom I had intended to make very creative, but ended up sounding full-blown schizophrenic). It was all very eerie. Advanced versions of this stuff are likely the future of entertainment, if this world doesn’t end, which could easily happen.

There are lots of different AIs to choose from these days, all with their particular personalities. Hermes 405B is clever but stiff, not too good at acting, and on long conversations it ends up repeating itself. Magnum 72B is wild, uncensored, and generally fantastic, but also tends to repeat itself, and has a very short context window. Claude 3.5 Sonnet is the best speech writer I’ve come across, but has an “ethical” filter, and tends to soften up every situation. There are quite a few others, but I’ve been dealing with those the most recently. I can’t imagine how this is going to progress in the coming years.

Do I have anything more to say at half past five in the morning when I’ve been awake for three hours already? Probably not. I’ll take a piss, then hope to get some shut eye. I suspect that nobody is actually reading my posts anymore (despite the overwhelming number of hits today), but in the end, as always, I do things simply because I had the urge to do them. It’s not like I have to justify myself to anybody.

Life update (10/29/2024)

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As of yesterday, I’m unemployed. I was enjoying some vacation time from the Saturdays I had worked, as well as days they owed me from last year, but I had also taken almost the entirety of November as vacation time. Unfortunately, the guy whose medical leave I was covering has returned to work (technically he will return on Monday, but administratively he’s back). That means that my contract has ended, and I’ll have to call HR and ensure that my scheduled vacation time will show up as extra money in my last paycheck.

Worse yet, I have returned to the dreadful wasteland of not knowing when I’ll get recalled to work. I may get woken up at eight in the morning any given day (even on a Saturday), and told to show up at the office a couple of hours later. And it’s a really bad time for me to return to work, because next month, the project to replace every goddamn computer in the hospital complex starts, and my boss had already informed me that he intended to involve me.

In case you haven’t been following my posts, I’ve dealt with stress-induced medical issues, including arrhythmia, as well as an episode that sent me to the ER and got me diagnosed with a complex migraine, likely a hemiplegic migraine, although I suspect it may have been a small stroke: the issues with my vision, the main symptom for which they diagnosed me with a migraine, ended up being related to a detached vitreous gel that a couple of weeks later developed into a torn retina; I had to hurry to the ER and get patched up with a laser (and my vision has ended up permanently fucked up from that episode).

Honestly, I don’t think I’m suited for full-time work. I can work tirelessly at my own stuff, and do so, sometimes even at night until I can’t think anymore, but working at an office, surrounded by human beings, is far too much for an autistic nutcase like me. Likely, though, any other job that would pay similarly would be far worse for me; I already tried to work in the private sector, more often than not for free, and I was a prime candidate to be let go or not hired because someone in charge considered me weird. Even had a direct boss argue with his superior that I was doing great technical work, only for that superior to let me go because I wouldn’t “fit in.”

Anyway, I’m busy with my programming project, but I also want to get my mind off this sudden change, so I’ll likely spend the whole afternoon in the beautiful city of Donostia, walking around or sitting at some outside table to read manga.

Being an adult sucks so much. Don’t ever do it, kids.

Life update (10/22/2024)

On By Jon UreñaIn Escritura, Slice of lifeLeave a comment

Tomorrow I start a vacation period that could last until early December, but the whole thing may end up getting cut short. These are the circumstances: I’m covering for a nutcase who goes on medical leaves constantly. I’ve been covering his latest leave for close to a year. In my country, if you extend your leave for more than a year, you’ll get transferred to Social Services, where you’ll be forced to do interviews with them and have some administrative issues. People usually want to avoid that, so I expect this person whom I have to refer to as my coworker to return a day before his leave reaches a whole year. That’s October 31st.

If the guy returns, my contract will end. I’ll get paid for the unspent vacation time (because I already scheduled it; wouldn’t have gotten paid for them otherwise), but that means that I’ll be unemployed, and I may get called into work right that day as part of a new contract. Best case scenario for me is if this coworker keeps working throughout November.

I really need time off in general, but even more so because I haven’t been doing well physically. As I posted some time ago, during a period of sustained stress for months, I suffered what a neurologist referred to as a “complex migraine,” likely a hemiplegic migraine: I was experiencing flashes of darkness in my right eye, and during the attack, I lost sensitivity in the right half of my body. I’m quite sure that I also caught a “burnt smell” at the time. The young doctor diagnosed me with a migraine because I had a history of migraines (that had ended since I started taking beta-blockers for my heart issues), and because of the visual aura. I’m quite sure he also said something to the effect of, “You’re too young to have strokes.” I should also be too young to have arrhythmia, or any of the other shit I’ve ended up burdened with, but here I am.

However, the visual aura never went away entirely, and a couple of weeks ago or so it developed into a torn retina. That got treated, leaving me, however, with permanent “floaters.” But it made me think that what I suffered at work wasn’t a migraine, but a stroke. I feel like I haven’t recovered fully from that episode, that I’m clumsier, more forgetful, and “off” in general since. I don’t know if you can spot brain damage in an MRI or if they just assume the kind of brain damage given the symptoms, but in any case, I have a visit scheduled for November 6th, that I hope will end up either confirming brain damage or giving me good news.

I must add that I have very little confidence in the medical profession, or at least as it stands now. I deal with many nurses and doctors on a regular basis. More often than not, the nurses are the chatty, dumb, “tactile” type, and the doctors are very often egocentric and have something of a god complex. I am vaccine-injured thanks to Moderna, and have visited three cardiologists for it. The first one, annoyed, denied that the covid vaccines caused any heart issues. The second, close to retirement, seemed ashamed of the whole thing, and admitted that the covid vaccines indeed were causing heart damage; he told me that he had treated lots of young women who had ended up in his office because they had acquired Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome (POTS) after covid or the vaccines. This doctor, however, behaved as if admitting that the vaccines caused any issue was a huge taboo. A third cardiologist said that indeed the vaccines were associated with heart damage, but that there weren’t enough studies to prove that they caused the problem or if they just triggered a predisposition toward having that problem. “What came first, the chicken or the egg?”. Hey, remember when you jabbed millions upon millions of people with an experimental treatment without having enough studies to prove their effects?

I’m my spare time, I’m working on my Flask/Python app neural-narrative, that allows the user to chat with characters controlled by large language models, and do some other narrative stuff. I’m very pumped to work on it, aching to return home and keep programming.

Recently I decided to add the overarching notion of Story Universes to the hierarchy of places of a story, and that led me to tinker with other stuff. I have yet to finish returning the app to normal, in a significant part because I added a new type to ensure that strings that should have content indeed had it. In retrospect, that was a mistake, because it would have been enough with validating the content of the string at times and throwing a ValueError if the validation failed, so I’ll have to get busy reverting those changes.

Good news is that I’ve racked up about 400 pytest tests to ensure the proper behavior of those parts of the code. All the tests are written by versions of OpenAI’s Orion preview model, which are wonderful for routine work that is very useful but annoying to write. Of course, preparing a part of the code so that it can be testable necessarily forces you to ensure its code quality (using dependency injection, adhering to the Single Responsibility Principle, etc.). However, I also have a God Class lingering around, one that handles everything related to the file system, that I’ll need to chop up and test soon.

OpenAI recently released an initial version of a “swarm of agents” framework, that will allow you to easily set up chains of responsibility and action with an arbitrary number of AI agents. That has gotten me thinking about setting up a writers’ room page in my app in which you could speak in natural language, and different AI agents specialized in writing, analyzing lore, considering character development, etc. would work on whatever aspect of the ongoing story you want to touch. It could work pretty much like a real writers’ room, but without the nasty ego and other human aspects.

I’ll try to visit new places during this vacation time, although I’m limited by my lack of a car, poor stamina, IBS, etc. Thankfully I have plenty of money. I’m also aching to get lost in a good game, and I have eyed that new JRPG by the Persona dudes, Metaphor: ReFantazio, quite lustfully. I’m constantly reading similar stories (although usually with an isekai bent), and most Western games are falling one after the other to the ESG and DEI rot, so you can’t rely on those. However, I don’t know if I can justify to myself playing games when I’m constantly juggling creative projects.

Life update (10/14/2024)

On By Jon UreñaIn Escritura, Slice of lifeLeave a comment

My week-long vacation has ended, and I’m writing these pointless words from the office. Back to the grind of fixing issues with printers, giving access to folders, and connecting cables to sockets. I don’t like my job, but it pays, so that’s what I do.

I don’t feel like writing fiction at the moment. I’m always compelled to work on this or that project, but my subconscious is the one holding the reins, and I don’t have any say in it. Most of my brain’s operating time these days has been occupied with thoughts of how to improve my Python project neural-narrative, that allows the users (meaning me and the few people that have cloned the repository) to chat with characters controlled by large language models, and in general engage in roleplaying with a large language model acting as the Dungeon Master. It’s all very exciting. I have been thinking about implementing events, lore books, and plenty of other weird stuff. Shortly after I got to work, I started relaying Hermes 405B my doubts about how some sections of the javascript code underlying my pages worked. I’m a systems builder by personality, and this is one interesting system to build. It certainly helps that at this point of AI development, the characters you can engage with behave like actual human beings, which is a bizarre thing to have gotten accustomed to.

I haven’t done much of note during this vacation time otherwise. I visited Donostia’s aquarium, and got a dose of nostalgia and grief due to my memories of having visited it back in 2021, with my then girlfriend Alazne. It just happens that it never happened: that visit took place in the novel I was writing (My Own Desert Places), and the actual last time I had visited the aquarium happened back when I was a teen or a child (I didn’t even bother to visit the aquarium so I could write the scene; sorry, writing gods). The act of writing a story brands your brain with memories similar to, if not stronger than your actual experiences. I’m not sure what to think about that, but in someone as isolated and generally avoidant of new experiences as myself, it may be a good thing.

A few days ago I went out for an aimless walk. I took a wrong turn and found myself climbing up a steep path. I love checking out new places, but I don’t have a car and I get anxious around human beings, so I can’t stray too far. Anyway, at a solitary stretch of the road, I found an even more deserted place: the cemetery. I realized I had never visited it, so I walked in.

I like cemeteries. They are usually empty, silent, and calm. As I strolled around, I ventured down a staircase and found myself in an underground lair of funeral niches. I thought of checking out the whole place, but I started getting a weird, sinister vibe, the kind that makes you think that you’re going to spot stuff out of the corner of your eye. I wasn’t in the mood to deal with ghosts, so I walked back up.

I spent maybe an hour reading the inscriptions on tombstones and checking out the gift and notes that the deceased’s loved ones had left. I came across the memorial for a girl I used to know, who got murdered by a psych student when she was barely twenty years old, and found out that her father, whom I used to see around in the neighborhood, had died six years earlier, before his time. I found the burial site of a twenty-two year old kid I knew about in my teens; as he rode his bike with his girlfriend seated behind him, he lost control and fell under the wheels of a truck. His girlfriend was unharmed, if you can call “unharmed” to look down at the burst remains of your loved one’s head. The last time I knew of that girl, she was attending the most prominent local disco then (I must have been sixteen or seventeen). She was wearing a T-shirt with the photo of her deceased boyfriend. At some point of the evening, she burst into tears. I don’t know what you do with your life after such a thing happens.

As I read the inscriptions on the tombstones, my mind pictured those people’s lives before they died, mainly the lives of those who died way before their time. One tombstone had etched the death dates of three members of the same family back in the fifties, and two of them were kids aged five and six. A girl with the peculiar name of Ninfa de Amo Díez had died in her early twenties back in the fifties or sixties. When I returned home, I googled that name, but nothing came up; at this point of our civilization, she may as well have never existed. It got me thinking, as I sometimes do, about the point of it all: you live, you fuck around for a while, and then you die. Soon enough, nobody will remember you. I guess the whole point is in the “fuck around for a while” part.

At some point, I felt permeated with a deep sadness. I could barely keep myself from getting teary-eyed. I wasn’t in the mood to start crying in a public place, even though there was nobody around, so I left.

Now that I’ve returned to work and I’m forced to do things I don’t want, I’m getting reacquainted with the notion that my body and brain don’t work as they should. For example, I was supposed to patch a network connection, but I forgot to grab both the keys of the network rack as well as the device that allows you to follow the cables. It simply slipped my mind, as many things have over the last few years. As I was crouching around at the network rack, as soon as I stood up, a buzzing, a sort of sudden dizziness, coursed through my nerves, and it took me minutes to get back to normal. I feel in general like I’m degenerating faster than I should for my age. I have a visit to a neurologist scheduled for the sixth of next month, and I hope to get an MRI done.

I also got my right eye checked out by an ophthalmologist, a couple of weeks after I experienced a torn retina. She told me that the debris and other weird shit that has ended inside my right eye (like a tangle of fibers that keep swaying before my vision) are pretty much there until I die. Wonderful news. She suggested to wear sunglasses outside, because such shadows in my vision are more prominent under the glare of the sun. I’m otherwise recovered from the ordeal.

Anyway, I think that’s all I needed to say at the moment.

Life update (10/07/2024)

On By Jon UreñaIn Escritura, Slice of lifeLeave a comment

For whatever reason, I’ve been thinking about my grandfathers. They are both long dead. Looking back, they were the kind of men who should have never been parents, and who due to their shortcomings, created all sorts of generational issues for their descendants.

I’m pretty sure that my grandfather on my mother’s side was autistic. He was that kind of extraordinarily introverted person with rigid thinking who had sensory issues and hated being bothered by anybody, even his kids. He fathered six or seven people, but didn’t raise them: he spent all day holed up in his study, clacking away at his typewriter. Not sure if his kids figured out what he was writing. If his kids were heard at all around his study, he’d stomp out at yell at them.

Apparently, at the end of his life, he confessed to one of his kids that he regretted the fact that he hadn’t been more open to people. I recall the last time he spoke to me: I had been dragged by my mother to her hometown, to hang out around her family, which annoyed me to no end as I couldn’t stand them. I was reading Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night, which I never finished (too heavy for a seventeen-year-old), when I noticed my grandfather staring at me. A few seconds later he pointed out, “You’re reading, huh?” I lifted my gaze to his, to that pathetic smile of someone who wants to interact while having no clue how to do so. I told him, “Yes,” then lowered my gaze to my book again. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him looking around awkwardly as he rubbed his hands.

I didn’t like the guy. It’s no exaggeration to say that I exist because he was a complete shithead. He opposed my mother studying medicine, because he believed that women shouldn’t work. At the end of my mother’s first month as a nurse, he cashed her wages, and bought a book collection for himself, one large enough to fill most of the shelves of his long indoors balcony. My mother, outraged, skipped town. At the first town she ended up, she went searching for the first man who might support her, came across some doofus at a disco, got married and had children.

Regarding my grandfather on my father’s side, the situation was even nuttier. You see, until middle school, I spent the school breaks at my grandparents’, because both of my parents worked. I didn’t really interact with my grandparents (I can’t recall having talked more than five minutes total with either of them, if even that). My grandfather was the son of farmers from Valencia, and he got displaced as a child due to the Civil War. I remember him seated at their sofa, mumbling stupid stuff as he watched nature documentaries or cartoons. I spent most of my time at that home holed up in their guest room, seated at a desk to write or draw. At that point, I dreamed of becoming a cartoonist.

That grandfather was, let’s say, a bit peculiar. My primary school female classmates all knew him, and referred to him as “Jon’s grandpa.” One of the man’s hobbies was to hang out at the entrance of my primary school to approach little girls. He caressed their hair and told them what pretty princesses they were. This took place in the eighties and nineties, so he didn’t get in trouble; those were far more innocent times.

The last time he spoke to me, I came across him at a crossroads near his house. He looked sad and troubled; pretty sure he had already been diagnosed with the bone cancer that would eventually kill him. I remember him glancing at an African man passing us by, then saying, “Everything is changing so fast. I don’t know what’s happening.” I’m old enough to remember a time when meeting in this country a single person from South America was a novelty that prompted everyone to ask them questions. These days, half of the people you come across are ethnic aliens. Most of those accompanied by children are ethnic aliens. And we aren’t getting their “best and brightest” precisely.

Anyway, as my grandfather was lying in his deathbed from which he never stood up again, my parents told me a troubling anecdote: his caretaker had left for five minutes to buy some groceries, when my grandfather suddenly came with some bout of pain or something for which he would have to take the medicine. He called one of his children on the phone. The person told him, “Look at the row of medicine beside your bed. Take the one that says X.” My grandfather burst into tears, then cried out, “I can’t read!”

That man had organized his entire life around hiding the fact that he had never learned how to read. From the stuff he put on the TV, to the situations he involved himself in, if it included some text on the screen, sometimes he simply wandered away without a word. Imagine what sort of father he was; clearly he never taught his children anything. He must have gotten in his head that the shame of others learning that he was incapable of reading and writing was impossible to live with, even though it was understandable: he had been the son of impoverished farmers who couldn’t send him to school, and he endured the Civil War during his schooling years. Instead, due to the man’s choices, he produced a far bigger shame: that of a coward who hid from even his own children so they wouldn’t find out his secret.

In addition, that man allowed one of his sons, my father, to be physically abused for years. I never asked for the specifics, but my father’s uncle regularly beat him over the head, causing him obvious brain damage, if they committed any errors while assisting him as he played the accordion, or some shit.

Anyway, don’t know why I’ve thought about these two long-dead people recently. It’s not like they matter anymore. But the lessons I got from them, one that has been clear to me for a long time, is that some people simply shouldn’t have children; they have to recognize that in themselves and spare their descendants the pain. The world would be a far better place it people took that to heart.

EDIT: I fed this post to the Google thing that produces AI podcasts, and it came out well enough.

That was too short, so I produced a new one, and it turned out to be more interesting.