Tag: blog

Life update (12/10/2024)

On By Jon UreñaIn Escritura, Slice of lifeLeave a comment

I’ve worked as a computer technician for a hospital for about six years. A couple of weeks ago, though, the big boss at the office told me that until January 12, I would be programming instead. I’m a trained programmer, not that it necessarily means anything; some of the best programmers in the world are mostly self-taught, and I’ve certainly learned more on my own than from any course. In any case, working these past few weeks as a programmer for this public health organization has shown me that most of my issues with my job these last six years were due to me being ill-suited to my tasks.

I suppose I’ll have to mention again that I’m autistic, as in literally autistic. Atypical synaptic pruning resulting in idiosyncratic neurological pathways and all that. As permanent as Down Syndrome, but fancier. While many (perhaps most) autistics end up the groaning, hitting themselves kind (not that I don’t groan or hit myself at times), I can sustain a semblance of normalcy, with severe limitations relevant to this matter: I have a hard time handling change and interruptions, noise, bright lights, interaction with human beings, etc. I also have a, let’s put it this way, unstable interior world.

Computer technicians are the firefighters of the computer world: some days very little happens, and other days you’re putting out fires everywhere. The notion of heading to the office and spending seven hours dreading whatever unpredictable problem may come my way grinded on my nerves. Most of those tasks also involve dealing with users, which I fucking hate, as I dislike interacting with humans. Programming, though, is generally blissful: I know in advance what needs to be done, and I’m on my own, building the system so that a computer performs that task. I even do it for fun in my spare time, as you know already if you’ve followed my posts. I’d say I’m a pretty good programmer. In addition, with AI these days, you can do the job of a week in a day.

My issue with my current job has been, unsurprisingly, the human element. I attend meetings almost daily to figure out how to progress from our current point, and all those meetings have been a demonstration on how differently other people’s brains work compared to my autistic brain: for me, the topics jump wildly from one to another, based on logic I can’t grasp. When the conversation seems to be approaching something resembling concrete information, suddenly I have to process interjections or digressions. It’s like trying to keep your toes in contact with the sea floor while the waves keep pushing you around. From time to time I try to steer the conversation in ways I can comprehend, such as, “So, to produce this result, this and this data are relevant. Do I have that right?” I rarely need more than that information, so as far as I’m concerned, the meetings could be reduced to five minute affairs.

I’ve been called “serious” more times that I can count. I even had one random employee of the hospital, who watched me exit a network closet, say, “Ah, I know you, you’re that serious guy from the bus.” I didn’t recognize him, but I guess he takes the same bus to work. I’m a silly bastard, and my interests are generally as unserious as can be, but I guess I have one of those faces. In addition, I barely speak, and when I do, it’s because a point needs to be made. I’m not the person to rely on when you need emotional support, because if I pay attention at all, I probably won’t give a shit. Yes, this would make me a terrible partner and father, and you know what? I refrain from being either. If I had the body to get away with it, and could stand people a bit more, I would have probably been the hit-it-and-quit-it type. Not that it particularly matters, but my bus and train rides are a succession of, “Man, she looks good, really fills out those leggings. Cute face. Damn, that long hair is so shiny and soft. Check out that mommy type; I’d love to see her in some lingerie. I need to squeeze that ass.” Thankfully I spend most of the time looking down at my tablet.

Anyway, what I guess I wanted to say is that I’m doing much better than usual. When I wake up in the morning, I don’t think, as I constantly did, like Ignatius Reilly put it in Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces: “The day before me is fraught with God knows what horrors.” I read manga on the train (right now Hanazawa’s Boys on the Run; fantastic read), do some programming, attend a meeting or two, then head home to continue exploring of my range of kinks (did one about rescuing a girl from homelessness yesterday; real lovely). True self-exploration kind of deal. I’m also getting triple pay this month due to the holidays’ extra and unspent vacation time. So things could be far worse.

However, things haven’t gone well for people who are technically attached to me. My brother’s dog had to be put down, which caused him to kick a curb and break his big toe. Three or so weeks of medical leave. Just yesterday, my sister’s boyfriend got into a serious car accident and somehow got sent home despite having head trauma, his car having gotten totalled. My parents are old and progressively getting more unhinged. That sort of thing. I’m a detached sort of fellow so I can’t say I take any of it to heart too much. However, my two remaining cats are quite old, and whenever they die, it’s going to fucking devastate me as the previous deaths did; that’s mainly why I’ve decided to never own pets again. I just can’t take the heartbreak. On a fundamental level, I think it’s wrong to raise some creature that you know won’t outlast you; it’s like a perversion of the child-rearing instinct or something.

That’s all for today, it seems.

Life update (11/30/2024)

On By Jon UreñaIn Escritura, Slice of lifeLeave a comment

Last Friday, the big boss at work called me into his office. Whenever any authority figure wants a private meeting with me, I always expect to be crucified for any of my myriad vile deeds. In this case, though, I was given unexpected news: he intends to use me as a programmer for the rest of this contract, and possibly about a month longer afterwards. I have worked as a computer technician on-and-off for about six years at the province’s public health organization, doing stuff very much unrelated to programming. However, my boss was aware of my background as a programmer, and I assume he also knows that I’d rather be coding than fixing users’ shit. The last time they offered me to code, it came at a real bad time, when I didn’t think I could handle anything like that due to physical and mental health issues; my contract was ending, and I much rather preferred staying unemployed for a while.

Long story short, starting from this Monday, I’ll exercise my Javascript skills to develop an internal app along with a couple of other workers. The most recent app I’ve been working on, neural narrative, involves Javascript and Python, so I shouldn’t have any issues. What worries me, though, is that I’ve yet to solve like five significant tickets, one that will force me to visit another hospital in a nearby town, so I suspect that on Monday I’ll find myself having to juggle setting up the proper environment to program along with solving those lingering tickets, which may easily take two-three days if everything goes well (and that rarely happens).

I despise change. My autistic brain handles it really poorly. But still, I can appreciate change toward something better, or what at least seems better from my current perspective. So I’m cautiously optimistic.

This morning I posted part 128th of my ongoing novel We’re Fucked. It’s hard to imagine that back in the day, I worked tirelessly at it for months at a time, not getting distracted by anything. And I dread to read any of my past material, because I suspect it’s much better than what I can pull off now, in a significant part, unless I’m delusional, due to my health issues that have affected my brain. I’ll try to focus on finishing this novel, and for that reason I’ve decided to involve my aforementioned Python app to liven up the process. I’ve already generated the characters of Leire and of her boss Ramsés.

Here’s the first portrait that my app generated for Leire, the troublesome protagonist of my story:

I like it in general, but this version of Leire looks less ghostly than I imagine her, and I also hate when the AI decides to make a catalog of equipment when I asked for a portrait, so I fired up another generation.

And that’s absolutely perfect, pretty much exactly how I have imagined Leire for these past three or so years: those vulnerable doe eyes, the haunted look of perpetual exhaustion and anxiety, the grooming issues, hiding herself in a hoodie. I’ll even forgive that her index finger is almost a pencil. Of course, Leire hasn’t looked quite like that ever since she embraced her mommy’s love; I’d like to see this version in a dress.

Leire is in many ways a bundle of my most troublesome instincts: OCD, intrusive thoughts, suicidal ideation, homicidal ideation, delusional thinking, an inability to stay on target even to save her life, a lack of concern for the world and herself, a tendency to hurt others without even meaning it… She’s probably my favorite character of all I’ve ever written, in part because most of the nonsense that bubbles up during freewriting sticks to her.

As for Ramsés, the AI came up with this:

Which is fine. I imagined him with a thinner, more receded hairline, and a less suave look, but I won’t complain.

Saturday is running out; these weekends just fly away. But apart from my worries about having to handle lingering tickets as soon as I get to work, next week paints itself better than all the other ones I’ve had in previous contracts, so my life could be much worse at the moment.

Life update (11/28/2024)

On By Jon UreñaIn Escritura, Slice of lifeLeave a comment

Today and tomorrow I’m on the afternoon three-to-ten shift. This morning I woke up at half past eight. When I got up from bed, my body felt twice as heavy. It didn’t take me long to wish I could just crawl back into bed. I barely pulled off a paragraph of my ongoing novel before I quit, because pushing myself when I’m not feeling it is a recipe for me to end up hating a task. I ended up browsing YouTube idly throughout most of my spare time.

At half past one, when I needed to walk up to the bus stop to take the vehicle that would carry me to a train that would carry me to another bus that would carry me to the hospital complex where I work, I desperately wished to be asleep. The prospect of enduring through a whole afternoon and evening of bullshit at work seemed like a genuine torture. The midday light was too bright, everything irritated the hell out of me, and when I finally got to the hospital, answering my coworkers involved fishing words out of my throat, and my voice came out raspy. I felt numb, confused, slow, unable to focus properly on my tasks. A cold ache in my chest wouldn’t go away. I had to face reality: my oldest, most loyal friend had returned for a visit.

If I only went to work when I feel like I can endure half a day of that bullshit, I would be on medical leave through most of my contracts. This adulting thing is beyond me. Who would want to do it? I guess if you must support a family, kids and such, you have that drive, which I can barely understand. But if you already know you’re going to die on your own, without burdening anyone with your faulty genes? What’s the point of all this? I’m basically working for the privilege to continue existing, even though I don’t even like being alive.

Pointless musings, as usual. Besides masturbation, I’ve only felt good this last couple of days while I was immersed in the manga I was reading (about three different ones), so no wonder I’m so attached to them. I’ve tried to get back into playing the guitar, but, man, my fingers are slow. I’d love to buy a new VR headset, but I’m waiting for a reliable new generation to come; I have the HP Reverb G2 Mark I, and its ability to track the controllers is simply not good enough, which has made me miss lots of interesting experiences. One of the best VR experiences I had involved playing through the first act of Cyberpunk 2077. I felt incredibly immersed, but by the end I decided that I didn’t want to compromise the quality of the experience; I don’t have a good enough GPU to run it similarly to the original, so I’m waiting for the nVidia 5000 series. It’s going to make a dent into my savings, but if anything I have is money. Too bad money can’t buy a brain that doesn’t make me feel terrible most of the time, or a body in which I want to live.

Yesterday I saw a stupid time travel movie from 2023 about a girl who goes back to 1987 to stop her mother’s killer. I have something of a savior complex, and I love time travel stories particularly if they involve saving someone. However, the movie ended up being a reminder of why I hate the modern West. If you’ve watched it, you probably know why. I don’t want to waste time detailing my problems with it. I also tried to get into that The Fall Guy movie, starring Ryan Gosling, whom I usually like, but it didn’t hold my interest. Not sure why. Most movies feel too artificial, too fake. It certainly doesn’t help that I don’t like seeing human beings even on a screen, so every movie and show has to counteract my innate disdain for my own species.

Anyway, it’s eight in the afternoon and I’m alone in the office. My coworker has already left for the day. I’m lounging here, writing these pointless words, hoping nobody calls with an issue. That’s all I had to say, I suppose. I feel like I’ve become a Minoru Furuya protagonist, and that reminds me of the sad fact that Furuya hasn’t worked on a new manga since 2017.

Life update (11/27/2024)

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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)

On By Jon UreñaIn Escritura, Slice of lifeLeave a comment

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)

On By Jon UreñaIn Escritura, Slice of lifeLeave a comment

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)

On By Jon UreñaIn Escritura, Slice of lifeLeave a comment

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)

On By Jon UreñaIn Escritura, Slice of lifeLeave a comment

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.