Tag: blog

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.