Tag: writing

We’re Fucked, Pt. 81 (Fiction)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial3 Comments

When a bolt of lightning, from the storm clouds that are sieging this business park, blinks behind me, the flash reflects off the three computer monitors. One screen shows a photo of Nairu and me at the zoo. Another, a pouty Jacqueline-smile. The third monitor displays a close-up of mommy’s thoroughly-licked pussy. That flash also lights up the grotesquerie stuck to the opposite wall of the office: a corpse made of spoiled cottage cheese, a stygian soup of shadowy excretions that are oozing down in elongating filaments of goo. Its distending and widening surface appears grainy and lumpy under a greasy coat of slime. As the rumble of thunder ripples through my skin, the ceiling-mounted lamps keep illuminating that viscous, squirming intruder as if it were a wall-wide kinetic sculpture.

My mouth is dry, my throat constricted. A tongue of ice slides down my spine. Otherworldly bizarrenauts can catch my spoor from space-times away as if my craziness wafted off me like some miasmic aura; this elephant-sized glutinous amoeba, spewed from some interdimensional sewer overflowing with bubbling septic matter, must have penetrated this realm to hunt me down and devour me alive. From the organic sludge stuck to the wall will erupt tentacles and pseudopods that, while dripping foul juices, twisting and writhing about in a necrotic choreography, will reach across the office toward its prey. The tentacles, their touch cold, slippery and slimy like a slug’s skin, will coil around my torso and limbs to ensnare me, clamping onto my flesh with a myriad of suckers and hooks. As the soles of my sneakers slide against the carpet, the tentacles will drag me back to the undulating pustule-tissue, then yank me into its gelatinous convolutions. Once the blob engulfs me, acidic pus will flow around me like thick mud, will seep into my pores, will slither inside me through my nostrils, ears, mouth, anus and vagina as if I were being basted with a goopy sauce, clogging up my windpipe, impregnating me with caustic enzymes that will rip me apart cell by cell. My hair will fall out in clumps, my skin burn, my eyes shrivel up. As my flesh sloughs off and my bones unknit from one another, a soup of acidic toxins will eat away at my organs, melting them like lard in a frying pan, until I dissolve into a slurry of pulp and corroded bones floating amid a festering broth.

My trembling knees threaten to buckle under me, and a guttural scream is building up in my chest. Am I helpless before this onslaught of invertebrate evil? Should I tolerate being harassed, let alone ingested, by some mass of jellified boils and warts? I could hardly wrestle even a child into submission, but my equine pal, through his selfless sacrifice, provided me with the means to blast this malignant mold before it snatches me up.

If Spike hadn’t jumped to his death in front of me, he would rush to my aid galloping through the streets. I picture his hooves clattering on the asphalt, his mane flying in the wind, a halo of electric discharges enveloping his body. He would burst through the window, shattering it in its frame, scattering glass shards across the carpet. While snorting fire from his nostrils, my gallant steed would plunge his teeth into that tumorous pest. The blob would split open and splatter into goopy, gummy lumps below Spike’s belly and fetlocks. In a frenzy of white-hot flames, he would gouge out the intruder’s putrid protoplasm, he’d trample on the gloop that flopped onto the carpet. My equine pal would lick his lips and slurp down the puddles of amoebic goo. After guzzling enough of the vile brew to choke a bull, Spike would turn and charge back through the window frame with a triumphant bray. He’d tumble down the street that slopes from the business park, crushing the carcass of some squashed roadkill, before crashing into a fence. Then Spike’s body would disintegrate with a silent whoosh as his fur, flesh, blood, viscera, bones and marrow were engulfed by a nimbus of flame. Ash and cinders would remain where a horseman’s corpse once lay.

I scuttle to my workstation and shove my swivel chair aside. After I place the cellphone on top of my open notebook, from the right pocket of my trousers I retrieve the key chain, but my hands are trembling; I drop the keys on the carpet. Their brass heads sparkle in the fluorescent light. As I grit my teeth to steady my nerves, I crouch in front of the cabinet under the desk, I scoop up the keys and fumble with them to unlock the top drawer. I slide it open. Safely stowed among paperclips, ballpoints, tissues, breath mints, earbuds and tampons rests Spike’s revolver.

The silvery, polished steel of the frame gleams. Bands of shadow run along the metallic valleys of the barrel, along the flutes of its thick cylinder. I smell the phantoms of gun oil and cordite.

I glide the fingertip of my thumb across the revolver’s cool, sleek surface. I touch the relief of the checkered wood grip, as well as the skull and bones engraved on the frame. I’d love to engrave next to it the portrait of a woman with sunken eyes, emaciated cheeks and dead skin peeling off her face, accompanied by scrawled black letters that would spell “A Horseman Never Fails,” but I lack the artistic skill and patience.

I slip my fingers around the grip, then I lift the revolver off the bottom of the drawer. The weapon feels stocky and heavy in my grasp, like a rock in a world of gelatin. When I straighten my back, a trigger’s click in my brain makes me shudder as a burst of images shoots across my mind. Why don’t you point the gun to your temple, old girl? Or how about you shove the barrel in your mouth? Don’t you want to press the tips of your incisors against the steel? Don’t you want to lick the cool muzzle and figure out how it tastes? A round must glimmer at the end of that dark tunnel. How many shots can you fit inside your overheated cranium? Don’t you want to see stars? Squeeze the trigger and rid yourself of your noxious mental parasites. Rectify the mistake of your existence. Plunging scissors or knives through your eyeballs to reach the brain behind would involve an agony, but a single bullet would rip through your axons, dendrites and nerve synapses, releasing your ghosts from the crevices within before they could manifest pain. You’d free yourself from the incessant taunting, the obsessions that gnaw at your sanity, the disgust and shame for your body and mind, the self-hatred, before nature herself debases you, after a hell-spawned downward spiral ending in dementia senilis, into a slurry of flesh and bone equal to the carcasses of squashed rats rotting in a gutter. Squeeze the trigger, woman of the pastures. Bury that tumor deep inside yourself.

A drop of sweat runs down my forehead, although an icy chill has made goosebumps prickle all over my skin. I grit my teeth, narrow my shoulders and take a deep breath. No, I won’t kill myself today; if I had the guts to shoot myself in the head, to exorcise that devouring evil lurking within my skull, I wouldn’t have suffered for years like some maimed dog in its owner’s backyard, waiting for someone to throw it a scrap of meat. Besides, I’ve learned to cope with my insanity through orgasm-based therapy.

Maybe I should put down the revolver, crawl into a corner and cry like a child while furiously fingering my clit, but I have outgrown that helpless little girl. I must obliterate the cosmic pox before it pours its poison into anyone’s holes.

Author’s note: today’s song is “Little by Little” by Radiohead, as well as this live version, that may be better than the original.

I keep a playlist with all the songs mentioned throughout this novel. Ninety-one songs so far. Check them out.

Lately I’ve been bothering a genius neural network so it would render images related to whatever was going on in the story. Here’s the corresponding post for this chapter.

The Steam version of Dwarf Fortress has been released! It even includes Workshop features, which means that people will upload thousands of mods in a matter of months. Check out its launch trailer. This game inspired Minecraft, Factorio, Rimworld and countless others, and I have admired its legend for about fifteen years.

We’re Fucked, Pt. 80 (Fiction)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial4 Comments

I rest my forehead on the windowpane, that barely insulates the office from the cold of this November sunset. My breath fogs the glass. Our star is a cream pie on which someone has landed ass-first, splashing its pinkish-orange filling all over the sky. The fat storm clouds that drift by are dyed the color of dried blood; mixed with the charcoal-black of the clouds themselves, they resemble stains on the clothes of plague victims.

As sound waves pour from the speaker of my cellphone down my ear canal, I close my eyes and rely on my echolocation to render the scene that’s taking place at home: Jacqueline, my queenly beloved, is explaining the purpose of a cellphone to our adopted daughter Nairu, who contributes high-pitched vocalizations of nonsense syllables, sounding more like a fairy than a human child. The forms of the two females, sculpted in obsidian, stand on the carpet of that remote living room, framed against the shapes in relief of the cabinet and the widescreen TV.

My chest feels hollowed out with longing. I’m craving something sweet, warm and moist. I wish I were lounging on the sofa with my girlfriend and our Nairu, but the clock is ticking on the evening hours, and I need to progress my programming tasks for this job that sucks the joy and wonder out of my life.

Through the phone’s speaker comes a rustle, followed by Jacqueline’s sultry voice. Her full lips must be brushing the plasticky surface of her phone, spattering it, blessing it, with microscopic particles of saliva.

“I won’t get Nairu to understand the concept of a phone today, but she misses her other mommy. That’s what I wanted her to convey to you, sweetie.”

I’m touched by my girlfriend’s attempt to comfort and cheer me up, but am I capable of tending to a child’s needs to the extent that she would appreciate me as a mother? Thankfully, Nairu would become a functional adult even if she grew up as a stray; the Ice Age gifted us an Asian kid tempered in the boreal cold, who survived her skirmishes against an ensemble of Paleolithic megafauna. Grade A material.

My voice comes out in a croak, as if a lump was blocking my throat. I swallow hard to dislodge it.

“She must have been cuddling with you all afternoon, so she has likely forgotten that I exist.”

Jacqueline giggles. Nairu was babbling in the background when a flash startles me. A porcelain-white vine of lightning, twisted and barbed, has streaked through the thick belly of a storm cloud, burning its image into that gray slug filled with rain. The electric crackle sends a shiver down my spine, then a shudder forces me to narrow my shoulders. I imagine myself as a critter caught outside during a storm in the tropics: a tree snail clinging onto a mangrove to weather nature’s wrath.

“Eide?” Nairu asks over the phone.

She remembers me! Her worried voice sounded like a cat meowing at a screen that shows her missing owner.

“Help me, Nairu! I’m trapped in this futuristic device!”

Jacqueline’s laugh comes through like a bell pealing over the hilltops. Nairu’s high-pitched voice dwindles to a murmur; I picture my beloved holding the phone to her own ear with one hand while her other strokes the child’s Paleolithic hair.

“I’m sure she fears that you may get attacked by any of the monsters she encountered in the Ice Age, yet you go and tease her. If anything like that would happen, you’d be a goner, little missy. They would consider you a delicious breakfast buffet, the tastiest and nuttiest prey in their hunting ground. So do I, for that matter.”

“Those beasts weren’t monsters, though. Just misunderstood.”

“Even so, the trick is to survive. Fortunately, Nairu’s tummy is full. No danger that she might starve to death. And like you suspect, we have been cuddling all afternoon. She has also discovered the wonders of animated movies. A Pixar one, we got it paused now.”

Despite the distance between us, Jacqueline sounded so snug, like a fur pelt draped over my shoulders, that I can picture myself pressed up against her on the sofa, instead of standing in this brightly-lit, air-conditioned office as I gaze out past the reflection of my computer screen at the thickening gloom of the twilight. Those storm clouds resemble an avalanche of dirty snow sliding across the sky in slow motion.

“Our adopted nugget may be considered insane by today’s standards,” I say, “but she can still enjoy the visual feast presented by 3D environments and characters on a widescreen television. Glad you’re keeping her fed and warm in that glass-encased bubble while I risk my life in this forest of cement and metal. In any case, which Pixar movie were you watching? I hope you chose one of the classics, instead of the turds they’ve been pushing out since they got gobbled up by that demonic mouse, a slobbering beast that has hijacked children’s imagination.”

Jacqueline’s response drowns in a thunderclap like a cannon shot, one that ripples through my body. My arms tense up, my toes curl in my socks and shoes. Above the flat roof of the opposite building, whose silhouette resembles a tombstone, I glimpse the afterimage of the lightning bolt. A drifting cloud has unveiled the moon and its silvery haze: a thinning scab on a bruised sky.

“Did you hear the thunder, Jacqueline?” I ask in a rough voice.

“Poor thing, you must feel like I called from another dimension. I’m just a ten minute drive away from you. But yes, a thunderstorm is rolling in, honey. It may turn nasty soon.”

The part of me that retains a percentage of genes from a dog, procured by some freaky ancestor of mine, wants to yank open the window and stick my head out, so I can bathe my face in cold air that must smell of rain. Being trapped in this dead office instead of spending the evening with Jacqueline and our girl makes me long for an earthquake or flood to strike, for me to see the streets choked with mud, and cars crushed under heaps of debris.

I rub my eyes and take a deep breath to scrub from my mind the yearning for another cataclysm, one that would leave this planet exposed to the starlight.

“A-anyway, what movie did you pick, my statuesque queen of love and lust?”

Jacqueline giggles.

“Toy Story, dear.”

“Ah, the classic tale involving a murderous cowboy and a clueless space marine. An original, daring narrative that wouldn’t get produced in today’s industry. The 3D humans in that one would traumatize me even now, but… has Nairu ever seen a toy in person?”

“Well, they carved figurines out of wood, right? The Ice Age peoples, I mean.”

“Nairu contradicts some basic assumptions about a child’s knowledge that would make the movie work. When we buy her toys, won’t she assume that they’ll spark to life the moment she looks away, even though they’re made of plastic or some other non-biological material?”

“That may be the case, but wouldn’t it make her world more magical and wondrous?”

“Or sordid and disturbing. I wouldn’t have wanted my toys to know what I did in the privacy of my bedroom. Particularly the stuffed triceratops with the yellow plaid bowtie, who stared blankly at me while I lay in bed with my panties around my ankles, trying to achieve the perfect orgasm. What if the dinosaurs talked to each other? ‘Hey, did you catch sight of the human doing it to herself?’ I would have felt like a pervert.”

Jacqueline must have pulled the phone away from her mouth to muffle a laugh. When she speaks again, her giggle-like tone warms everything within its reach, like the heat emanating from the belly of a giant furnace.

“You should have locked up the stuffie, locked him away and kept your shameful secret a secret. Anyway, I promise you that Nairu loved the spectacle on screen; she gaped and gaped at the talking toys. So focus on what truly matters, my girl: plenty of love is flooding from both of our hearts towards the tiny sweetie that you took out of the ice.”

I nod at Jacqueline’s distant presence, although I’m picturing her assemblage of dildos and vibrators doddering around in her wardrobe like stoic, limbless soldiers, leaving trails of lubricants with each stump-step. They clamber over the piles of external hard drives that store hundreds of gigabytes’ worth of our lovemaking sessions, as well as of the fabled girls that Jacqueline employed to build her porn empire. I imagine myself sitting at the edge of mommy’s bed, facing my reflection in the mirrored wardrobe as her dildoes and vibrators knock and knock on the inside of the door, vying for the privilege of joining me in a muggy session of self-worship. They are calling to me with dollish voices meant to sound melodic: “Hello, Jacqueline’s cummer! Do you need assistance? We are here to serve your needs, little lady!” My own voice interferes: “Come on, motherfucking dildos and dongs, let me get inside this stinking sack of skin so I can taste my own flesh, so I can be submerged in a sea of pleasure, so I can feel something besides the excruciating pressure of my brain against my skull. To hell with you dicks. The last thing I need is a swarm of cocks and pricks crowding my crotch!”

I shudder, then bite my lower lip to keep from giggling, or crying out in distress.

Lightning zigzags along the night sky, and as its glare whitens the windowpanes, I’m left with the afterimage of a black blot suspended in the air between the glass and the opposite office building. A vulture-sized bug? The blot is accompanied by the blurry images of the long desk, the three chairs and the rectangular glow of my monitor. As the booming rumble of thunder sweeps through the business park, a realization prickles the hairs on my nape: I glimpsed a reflection. Or maybe the blot is me.

I look over my shoulder. At the other end of the office, on the lily-white wall, a tar-black stain is growing like ink bleeding into paper, like oil leaking from a deep puncture hole.

Lightning-lizards lurk outside, spreading out their glow into the room while jagged hairline cracks hover in front of me, superposed to the vision of the office and its flickering ceiling-mounted lamps, as if I were encased in scratched glass. My nostrils fill with the odour of burnt ozone.

A crackle of thunder reverberates through my bones and makes my blood surge hotly toward my groin. The hairline cracks have vanished, replaced by a uniform, flawless plane. I am one with the glass.

The black blob on the wall, engulfing a larger patch of white, pulsates as it swells, bulges out in viscous globs like a toilet backing up, and oozes down in gooey tendrils. Light-snakes from the ceiling-mounted lamps are wriggling on the slimy, visceral mass, a glistening murk that has gouged a hole in my skull and is crawling through my gray matter like a centipede.

My vision wavers; the world is swimming. I’m bobbing up to my nose in a gelatinous sea that tastes of vinegar and fish guts. I shiver at the flapping sound of fat membranes uncurling, at the feel of viscid tissue-matter sticking to my skin. Lightning bolts illuminate the waves in stroboscopic flashes, making them resemble a seething kelp forest, while I thrash my limbs around to stay afloat against the churning currents.

From the phone that my right hand is gripping comes crinkly static, the sound of aluminum foil rustling. As the interference scratches my eardrum, a honeyed voice breaks through, floods my mind and envelops my thoughts like a welcoming womb:

“Leire, are you still there? That was some strange lightning phenomenon, must have messed up with the electronics. Thankfully I bought some overvoltage protectors.”

My heart is pumping in my throat. When I open my mouth to speak, my tongue flaps uselessly, and I only manage to exhale a pent-up breath.

“Leire?” Jacqueline insists. “You okay, honey? I can hear you breathing on the phone.”

I miss her luminous allure, that even before we started dating enticed me to steal glances at her. I miss the taste of her silky skin, like an ambrosial mixture of rosehip and milk. I miss the way her panties stick to her slit when she gets wet. I miss the feel of her long fingers kneading my flesh, of her nails scratching the skin of my back. I miss the firmness of her nipples grazing my breasts, the softness of her thighs wrapping around my face as I inhale the hot and juicy tang of her insides. I miss her gasps, sighs and moans during the throes of our lust-frenzy.

I picture the inverted triangle of prominent features that make up Jacqueline’s ivory-white visage: her penetrating cobalt-blues at the two upper vertices, and her full lips at the lower vertex. She’s standing in front of me in her peacoat and turtleneck sweater as the November wind tousles her hair. Jacqueline is my sole lighthouse, a beacon amidst the storm of insanity that rages inside and outside of me.

A croaking voice pours forth through the speaker embedded in my neck, where the voicebox and throat structure must be housed.

“Yeah, I’m still here, my goddess of delights, mistress of dreams. No time for a Pixar flick now, though. Overvoltage probably fried the electronics in my brain.”

Jacqueline’s laughter echoes into the farthest recesses of my being.

“You’re right. I’d love to keep you on the phone when I can’t keep you in my arms, but the sooner you finish that boring stuff, the sooner you can get your butt over here. And once you return to me… I may show you something special.”

“As in I won’t be able to peel your pussy away from my face?”

“Oh, I’ll open myself up to you in plenty of ways,” she answers with a sensual drawl that slithers down to my toes. “You have yet to experience some of my best moves, darling. Bye-bye for now!”

Once Jacqueline clicks off, the warmth evaporates, replaced by a tar-black blob that has encroached upon a huge chunk of the wall, a hole that sucks all hope through its bottomless whirlpool.

Author’s note: the five songs for today are “Man on the Moon” by R.E.M., “Pink Moon” by Nick Drake, “Catch the Wind” by Donovan, “Where Is My Mind?” by Pixies, and “Season of the Witch” by Donovan.

I maintain a playlist that contains all the songs mentioned throughout this novel. Eighty-nine songs so far. Check them out.

Hey, are you aware that neural networks can generate intriguing images based on the prompts you send them? I sent a couple of those artificial intelligences plenty of prompts from this chapter. Check out the results.

This chapter kicks off a new sequence, titled “Cumlord of the Abyss.” You can read any of the previous chapters of this novel through this link.

Life update (11/24/2022)

On By Jon UreñaIn Escritura, Slice of lifeLeave a comment

I didn’t want to post anything until I finished the current chapter of my novel, which will take a couple of days more or so. However, I’m feeling like shit at the moment. Writing about it is a way of palliating that psychological pain, so here I am.

My current contract at work was supposed to end this Sunday. I was already dreading the end of the week, because I’m always either told on Thursday or even on Friday (if they even “remember” to tell me) whether or not they will prolong my contract. As a thirty-seven year old man, most months I’ve had no clue if the next one I was going to be unemployed, and that has gone on for years. This time it’s even worse: my boss told me that they intend to keep prolonging my contract week by week for the foreseeable future, at least until January of next year.

People are supposed to be happy that someone pays them to work, I’m guessing. Not me: I’m absolutely fed up with my job as an IT guy at a hospital complex. I’ll mention again, for the umpteenth time, that I’m autistic and have OCD. I need, for psychological and neurological reasons, a set, clear schedule, controllable problems to deal with (if I’m forced to deal with any problems), silence, and the least amount of human interactions as possible. Instead I work at an office with an open plan, forced to deal with the moronic interactions of four/five adult men that behave like schoolchildren, with the corresponding noise pollution. In addition, I never know what kind of problem I’ll have to deal with that day, nor the kind of user that I’ll be forced to tolerate.

For example, yesterday I was ordered to switch the printers of PCs at opposite ends of the sterile processing department (the supervisor wanted the fancier printer for herself). Of course, I also had to configure them at their new destinations. I dressed myself like a local employee to enter the sterile environment. When I finished configuring the fancier printer on the supervisor’s PC and told it to print a test page, the printer refused to recognize that its frontal cassette was loaded with paper. I asked the supervisor if the printer worked properly beforehand. “Oh, I don’t know.” I suspect they wanted me to discover the error and fix it. I’m not the kind of IT guy that fixes physical errors in printers. In addition, the specific model of that fancy printer isn’t maintained by the governmental organization that runs these hospitals: the users are supposed to call Ricoh. After I told her this, she answered something like, “why do I need to do that? I’m too busy. You are the one paid to fix machines.”

As a technician employed with this governmental organization, I’m not paid to interact with that kind of printer beyond plugging it into a local PC and making sure it receives the print order. I considered telling her to fuck off and call the company herself as she’s supposed to; I feel like telling people to fuck off very often at my job. But I went through the trouble of calling the company myself. Of course, they told me that “they’ll send someone.” A couple of days. The supervisor considered that unacceptable, because she was supposed to print something in ten or so minutes (although she had ordered us to exchange a working printer for another one that “oh, I don’t know if it works”).

I manage to get the bypass loader working. I didn’t know they had one, because, again, my organization doesn’t maintain those printers. But the printer had the frontal cassette set as the priority source of paper; every time you sent a print order, the display showed an error, and the user had to select the bypass loader manually. The supervisor told me that it was too much of a bother. However, to change it in the options so it considers the bypass loader the priority, I would need admin privileges.

In the end, the supervisor made me responsible for dealing with the printer company and notifying her when they decide to send someone (if they even call me to notify me). I’m not supposed to do any of that, and certainly I’m not paid to do so either. I just gave in because such people are somewhat likely to complain to my bosses for it, and although the bosses know that dealing with those printers’ specific issues isn’t my responsibility, they’ll get annoyed with me if they receive a complaint call.

After that whole incident, I was done for the whole morning; I wanted to shut down and wait out until I left the office. However, it was half past ten in the morning, and I ended up having to deal with plenty more.

Every single day plenty of users demand us to do stuff for them, but often they fail to provide the basic information for solving those issues. “Hey, I need access to the shared folder that my coworkers access.” You end up having to write back to ask for personal information, what computer they are using, the specific path to the folder, etc. Plenty of times they prove themselves hard to reach. Often when they write you back it’s as if they failed to read half of your original message. Sometimes they give you incorrect information, although the correct one was plainly displayed on the screen in front of their fucking eyes. Needless to say, the whole thing is maddening.

When my boss told me they were going to prolong my contract and he saw that I wasn’t ecstatic about it, he said that he knew I intended to take a break to study for an upcoming public examination, which will determine how often they’ll call me back for such contracts. That exam is on the fifteenth of January, and I’ll likely be employed until then. I’m studying at the office, between tasks; I refuse to waste any time doing job-related stuff during my free time, which is devoted mainly to writing. However, I didn’t feel like I could share with anyone I know in person the real reason why I didn’t want to continue: I hate this job, I hate having to be employed, I have waking up at six in the morning to be surrounded with human beings until half past four in the afternoon, and I feel like I’m going crazier every passing day.

After I found out that I’ll likely be employed for the entirety of December (if they cut my current contract short, they’ll still call me to cover other people’s holidays), I’ve felt a cold ache in my chest, added to strange twitches and spasms I’ve felt in there since I received the latest “booster vaccine” about a year ago or so (which caused me atrial fibrillation, a physical issue with my heart). And honestly I just want to hide at one of the rooms that contain the network racks, to either kick a wall or cry for a bit. Perhaps both.

A logical solution to this issue could be to get another job. But by the time I was offered the first contract for this governmental organization, I had “struggled” to find employment as a programmer, for which I was trained. And by struggled I meant that for most of those years I couldn’t get a job, and half of the time that I did get a job, I wasn’t paid for it.

The last time I accepted one of those internships was through an organization that supposedly helps autistic people. The programming company put me working alone at a desk (I was fine with that). I dealt with a single boss who was happy with my performance, but by the end of that internship I was told that they wouldn’t hire me because they didn’t think I would be able to work well in a team. They knew I was autistic. The HR woman wanted me to feel proud that I had wasted six months of my life programming their intranet for free, because now their job was easier. Needless to say, I will never work for free again.

Anyway, my parents, with whom I don’t particularly get along, weren’t too happy about having to pay for most of my stuff during such periods of my life. But they forced me to exist, although they barely tolerated each other. Regarding my current predicament, I have never earned as much money as I do at my current job, although that isn’t saying much, as I barely earned minimum wage as a programmer. However, I’m a single man with no social life, so I’ve managed to build up some savings.

Very often at the office, while I waste another hour of my limited time as a living being, the thought crosses my mind that I should be sitting at home and writing. That’s what I’m meant to do due to the particular combination of nature and nurture that produced my idiotic existence. Some of those times I also think that if I had been born a hot enough girl, someone else could be working their ass off to pay the bills while I sat around at home while diddling myself. I’d have a juicy pair of tits as well, instead of these pituitary-tumor-induced man-boobs. Unfortunately I’m a weird-looking guy who’s only getting older, losing more hair and struggling to lose extra weight, and I wasn’t much better in my prime.

Regarding non-writing-related stuff, Chainsaw Man has been a joy (I was giddy throughout episode 7, knowing what was coming during that work party), and the Steam version of Dwarf Fortress will come out in less than two weeks. Silver linings, I suppose.

We’re Fucked, Pt. 79: AI-generated images

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial1 Comment

For the last few months I’ve been playing around with a couple of neural networks, one of them a serious artist and the other a pervert trained exclusively on anime. I had already rendered about three-fifths of the images I would have included in this entry, when a beast of a new neural network rolled out, one that plays in a different ballpark. You will notice the difference in abilities, particularly because its products will come after the other AIs’ attempts.

Anyway, the images below were inspired (and plenty served as references) by chapter 79 of my ongoing tale We’re Fucked.

I have posted thirty-three other entries with AI-generated images. Check them out.

Approximation of Leire that I asked the previous generation of the serious AI to render, mainly to compare the result with the stuff I included in this entry.
Just Jacqueline.
The Paleolithic child named Nairu that Jacqueline and Leire have known for less than a day, but that if anything bad were to happen to the child, both of them would murder everybody in the room and then themselves.
My initial attempts at getting some references for how the sky looked that night.
“A child’s vocal cords produce utterances of confusion close to my right ear, noises like those of a tourist who has been reduced to rely on primal vocalizations.”
“Am I a prisoner in some dark cave, or a homeless bum living in an alleyway, or a guru who takes orders from the voices in my head?”
“Behold, the glowing flower of a child’s face, with her chin tucked under a lemonade-pink scarf.” Both AIs appreciated the fact that lemonade was involved.
“Her smooth skin is tinged sand orange by the closest streetlamp, with paprika-red shadows.”
“In her monolid eyes, and surrounded by the sclera, her irises and pupils have merged into dark circles.”
“Nairu is sinking her gaze deep into the tunnel of my eyes, that leads straight to madness.”
“A glint of sentience must have returned to my eyes.”
“She seeks my input, although I’m the kind of woman who wanders naked into a boreal forest.” The serious AI won’t accept prompts with the word “naked” (as well as plenty of other words). Anime AI did accept that word, but failed to produce nakedness. Oh well.
Leire’s dream to see a UFO.
“They may be alien truckers that have pulled over for the night at their equivalent of a rest area, and tomorrow they will resume the trip back to their star system.”
“Once they supply the hydrogen and helium they siphoned from Jupiter, they’ll waste their wages at some alien brothel.”
“Is she trying to warn us that it’s over, that the end has come?”
“This is how the heavens ended up after the apocalypse.”
“Can a woman who grew up like a rat, scurrying around the streets until she reached her sordid shelter, imagine how the dome of the sky looked like before the mythological age?”
“The heavens would have been ablaze with a billion pinpricks of red, yellow, white and blue light, kaleidoscopic diamonds strewn across a carpet of indigo velvet.”
Amoeba-shaped nebulas.
“I would have recognized the shapes of Orion, Perseus, Taurus, Ursa Major, Cassiopeia and many other constellations, the gods that watched over our affairs from their far-flung thrones.”
“Hypnotized like moths, our hair would become infused with celestial phenomena, and our eyes would gleam in the cold starlight as we soaked up the silver song of the cosmos.”
“Even the beasts that agonized in a pool of blood, while their festering wounds flashed with burning pain, knew that their spirit would escape and ascend to milky river overhead, where they would float in the sparkling current forever.”
“The celestial curtain was torn apart; the nightly sky fell like a collapsed ceiling, crushing our ancestors.”
“When humans look up from their earthly hell at night, they face an ocean of blackness.”
“The dying sun hangs out in the sky like an aged streetlight.”
“Some nights, the glowing trails of meteor streaks cross-section a silent sky: reminders of the cosmic hazards that threaten us far above the corpses of ancient cities.”
“Our Earth, as it races unflinchingly toward her fate like a suicidal teen dashing across a highway, bathes in a major meteor stream twice a year, where millions of pieces of a long-fragmented comet, from glassy gravel to iron balls the size of football fields, plummet through the vacuum faster than a rifle bullet.”
“Now, where could they have hidden the stars without them cracking or shattering?”
“[…] that celestial eye and its ghostly glow hang out of frame. Its sclera has been corroded into dark cerulean patches, and bears star-shaped scars of ejecta from asteroidal impacts.”
“I wish that Jacqueline, Nairu and I could chase after the shimmering reflection of the moon like lunatic bats.”
“I peer into the black shroud up above us, that looks like the darkness floating inside a trash can full of rainwater.”
“I spot pinpricks of light, the last vestiges of a candle’s flame, glimmering at the fringes of my sight.”
“I focus long enough in the boundless darkness, allowing the stream of photons that traveled for millions of years to penetrate my pupils.”
“Arachne, Lady of the Abyss, Weaver of the Cosmic Web, She who spins the tapestry of time and space, She who trapped the galaxies in Her sticky filaments. She pulls out memories of a billion of our pasts and weaves them into strands around Her fingers. In the end, the cocoon formed out of our selves will serve as a nursery for Her hatching eggs.”
“Are those hands crawling up the outer edges of the world? Do they hunt with pincers, claws or talons?”
“I built towers that bristled with anti-tank weapons.”
“Soon enough my teeth will chatter, the chatter will become a moan, the moan will rise to a howl of despair, and the howl will echo over the frozen earth to the fathomless ocean of empty space, where the fringes of the expanding universe push against the invisible wall that separates us from the unknown.”
“I will hallucinate that I’m a deer running in circles on a desolate tundra, running and running until my hooves crumble into ice shards and the wind smears the last mist of my breath.”
“The centrifugal force of the Earth in its rotation has flung me out and I’m hurtling towards the black ocean above.”
“My mind was like a house whose every door had been slammed shut.”
“I imagined the mountains crumbling, the oceans flooding, the sky erupting in a fireball to vaporize everyone except the beasts.”
“My life back then was a grain of sand compared to the sediment on the seafloor.”
“Even kings and conquerors were icebergs compared to the glaciers beyond.”
“This world will freeze us, burn us, flood us, bury us, wipe us out.”
“Like soldiers in wartime, humans burrow in trenches to wait out the battle; we pretend that we’re safe while the cannons roar and the shells explode.”
“In this frozen darkness, two pockets of womb-like warmth remain where I can survive.”
“In an echo of the time when history began, in an age about to end, for now Jacqueline, Nairu and I lie nestled together at the center of our web, our own private constellation.”
“Let’s bathe in the cosmic ocean, let’s float in the currents of atoms and energy that flow through this universe.”
“I will take its waters in and quench my thirst.”

We’re Fucked, Pt. 79 (Fiction)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial3 Comments

A child’s vocal cords produce utterances of confusion close to my right ear, noises like those of a tourist who has been reduced to rely on primal vocalizations. A small head is resting on my arm, and I smell the shampoo and conditioner that cleaned that hair and scalp.

Am I a prisoner in some dark cave, or a homeless bum living in an alleyway, or a guru who takes orders from the voices in my head? I blink away the fog of drowsiness. I must have fallen asleep like a slug in its tiny burrow.

Behold, the glowing flower of a child’s face, with her chin tucked under a lemonade-pink scarf. Her smooth skin is tinged sand orange by the closest streetlamp, with paprika-red shadows. In her monolid eyes, and surrounded by the sclera, her irises and pupils have merged into dark circles. Nairu is sinking her gaze deep into the tunnel of my eyes, that leads straight to madness.

She sniffles, then wipes her runny nose with the sleeve of her wool sweater. A glint of sentience must have returned to my eyes; Nairu arches her eyebrows and repeats the utterances of confusion while pointing at the sky. She seeks my input, although I’m the kind of woman who wanders naked into a boreal forest.

I gasp, breathing in cold air. Don’t tell me she has spotted a UFO! About time I witnessed one of them. I picture a spacecraft shaped like a watch battery, hovering higher than the tallest mountain around. The stars are reflected in its silvery, mirror-like top half. In the underside, the gravity-bending propulsion engines, likely powered by a black hole, phosphoresce in shades of green, red and yellow as they interact with the atmosphere. Are there lifeforms riding the craft? They may be alien truckers that have pulled over for the night at their equivalent of a rest area, and tomorrow they will resume the trip back to their star system. Once they supply the hydrogen and helium they siphoned from Jupiter, they’ll waste their wages at some alien brothel.

The sky is painted onyx black. From the left, the canopy of an evergreen tree has sneaked into the frame. The coalesced silhouette of its leaves and branches resembles a hoarfrost-covered lung.

Nairu jabs her finger at the sky while she babbles in her long-extinct language.

“A-am I this drowsy,” I ask, “or is Nairu pointing at nothing?”

“I think that’s the point, darling,” Jacqueline says in a low voice from my left.

I gasp.

“I-is she trying to warn us that it’s over, that the end has come?”

“Baby, she’s telling us this isn’t the sky she grew up with.”

“Ah, of course. This is how the heavens ended up after the apocalypse.”

Can a woman who grew up like a rat, scurrying around the streets until she reached her sordid shelter, imagine how the dome of the sky looked like before the mythological age? The heavens would have been ablaze with a billion pinpricks of red, yellow, white and blue light, kaleidoscopic diamonds strewn across a carpet of indigo velvet. Among the glittering embers of the stars, among the amoeba-shaped nebulas, I would have recognized the shapes of Orion, Perseus, Taurus, Ursa Major, Cassiopeia and many other constellations, the gods that watched over our affairs from their far-flung thrones. Every night our gaze would have drifted towards the stars. Hypnotized like moths, our hair would become infused with celestial phenomena, and our eyes would gleam in the cold starlight as we soaked up the silver song of the cosmos.

Even the beasts that agonized in a pool of blood, while their festering wounds flashed with burning pain, knew that their spirit would escape and ascend to milky river overhead, where they would float in the sparkling current forever. But the celestial curtain was torn apart; the nightly sky fell like a collapsed ceiling, crushing our ancestors. Now, when humans look up from their earthly hell at night, they face an ocean of blackness, and during the day, the dying sun hangs out in the sky like an aged streetlight.

Some nights, the glowing trails of meteor streaks cross-section a silent sky: reminders of the cosmic hazards that threaten us far above the corpses of ancient cities. Our Earth, as it races unflinchingly toward her fate like a suicidal teen dashing across a highway, bathes in a major meteor stream twice a year, where millions of pieces of a long-fragmented comet, from glassy gravel to iron balls the size of football fields, plummet through the vacuum faster than a rifle bullet.

I blow a billowing white puff towards the sky, then I knead Nairu’s warm hand with my icy fingers.

“Yes, all that bright light is gone,” I say in a quavering voice while the chill pierces my bones. “You have noticed because you aren’t blind yet. Now, where could they have hidden the stars without them cracking or shattering? I know the truth, even though I don’t understand it.”

The darkness has blotted out the moon, or else that celestial eye and its ghostly glow hang out of frame. Its sclera has been corroded into dark cerulean patches, and bears star-shaped scars of ejecta from asteroidal impacts. I wish that Jacqueline, Nairu and I could chase after the shimmering reflection of the moon like lunatic bats. Instead, I peer into the black shroud up above us, that looks like the darkness floating inside a trash can full of rainwater. As I slide my gaze around, I spot pinpricks of light, the last vestiges of a candle’s flame, glimmering at the fringes of my sight. If I blink or distract myself, those twinkling dots will be snuffed out. Maybe I’m only imagining them, maybe I’m losing my mind, but what difference does it make to me? And if I focus long enough in the boundless darkness, allowing the stream of photons that traveled for millions of years to penetrate my pupils, I may get a glimpse of Her: Arachne, Lady of the Abyss, Weaver of the Cosmic Web, She who spins the tapestry of time and space, She who trapped the galaxies in Her sticky filaments. She pulls out memories of a billion of our pasts and weaves them into strands around Her fingers. In the end, the cocoon formed out of our selves will serve as a nursery for Her hatching eggs.

I’m hearing a low rumble in the distance, like the noise of an electric guitar being played with a grunge distortion pedal. The wind slaps its frozen fingers against my face. Although my brain is burning up, the cold is numbing my skin and creeping into my body, where it turns the blood into slush. Soon enough my teeth will chatter, the chatter will become a moan, the moan will rise to a howl of despair, and the howl will echo over the frozen earth to the fathomless ocean of empty space, where the fringes of the expanding universe push against the invisible wall that separates us from the unknown. I will hallucinate that I’m a deer running in circles on a desolate tundra, running and running until my hooves crumble into ice shards and the wind smears the last mist of my breath.

What’s that over the black hills? Are those hands crawling up the outer edges of the world? Do they hunt with pincers, claws or talons? Do you grow stronger as you pluck the meat from its sockets? The air tastes of fresh blood, which trickles down the gullets of your dying sisters. Suck the warm lifeblood flowing like sap from the wounds of your enemies. You can’t hold onto the lives of others, or even your own.

A sudden sensation jolts through my body: I’m falling and spinning. The centrifugal force of the Earth in its rotation has flung me out and I’m hurtling towards the black ocean above, in which the worlds are sinking like stones in water.

The hollow noises of footsteps and doors closing echoed in the velvety darkness as I sat on cold, anonymous stairs to escape from a prison of screams and insults. The blood of my ancestors coated my hands, dripped down my elbows and onto the step under my feet, where the blood puddled around my shoes. Its stifling odor, mingled with the sweat pouring out of me, turned into a nauseating wave of bitterness. My mind was like a house whose every door had been slammed shut. I closed my eyes and built shelters in islands and in the canopies of sequoias, I built towers that bristled with anti-tank weapons; anywhere I could rest as a hermit in sealed silence. I imagined the mountains crumbling, the oceans flooding, the sky erupting in a fireball to vaporize everyone except the beasts. In the end, the parting clouds would reveal the stars as they were before the sky cracked and bled.

“How long?” I whispered while tears formed in the corners of my eyes. “How long until She arrives?”

My life back then was a grain of sand compared to the sediment on the seafloor. Even kings and conquerors were icebergs compared to the glaciers beyond. This world will freeze us, burn us, flood us, bury us, wipe us out. Our cells will be devoured by rust. Like soldiers in wartime, humans burrow in trenches to wait out the battle; we pretend that we’re safe while the cannons roar and the shells explode. Yet, in this frozen darkness, two pockets of womb-like warmth remain where I can survive: one to my left and the other to my right. In an echo of the time when history began, in an age about to end, for now Jacqueline, Nairu and I lie nestled together at the center of our web, our own private constellation.

“How long?” I whisper again.

I’ve faced the barbaric, senseless absurdity step by step. The lights will shut off soon enough, so let’s bathe in the cosmic ocean, let’s float in the currents of atoms and energy that flow through this universe. I will take its waters in and quench my thirst.

Author’s note: the three songs for today are “機械仕掛乃宇宙” (Kikaijikake no Uchuu) by Ichiko Aoba, “Emily” by Joanna Newsom, and “Young Lion” by Vampire Weekend.

I keep a playlist with all the songs mentioned throughout this novel. Eighty-four songs so far. Check it out.

Three neural networks competed with each other to render images inspired by this chapter. Two of the AIs lost horribly. Check out the results.

Thus concludes the sequence titled “Who Stole the Stars?” as well as the saga of Nairu the Paleolithic, that started with the sequence “A Gift From the Ice Age” back in chapter 62 (which I posted in the 13th of July). More or less, this chapter also concludes the traditional second act of the story.

It took me about forty-one thousand words to render the setup and ramifications of a single sentence in my original treatment for this novel (long gone; back then I believed it would be a novella), that said, more or less: “Leire travels to the Ice Age and returns with a child.”

The next chapter will kick off a whole new sequence, titled “Cumlord of the Abyss.” I’ve accumulated 4,563 words of notes for it, but the sum of rendered scenes will end up at least twice and a half that length.

Life update (11/02/2022)

On By Jon UreñaIn Escritura, Slice of lifeLeave a comment

I usually write these entries to vent my frustrations, which serves a self-regulatory psychological function. However, I’m currently fine. Although the next cycle of depression will hit any day now (a process that will continue for the rest of my life), these days I can say that I’m perfectly content. In my free time I’m able to do exactly what makes me feel fulfilled; if I didn’t have to keep a full-time job, I’d feel like I’ve won the lottery.

Some years ago I gave up on writing because I’ve never felt comfortable enough working in my native language. As a child, I needed to put my thoughts down on paper for the same self-regulatory reasons as these days, but my mother didn’t believe in privacy nor in boundaries, so the moment I left the house, sometimes even while I was taking a shower, she went through my notebooks. When I complained about it, she told me that she had the right to do so.

I ended up teaching myself English. It became my personal language that gave me the space I needed to grow on my own, space I lacked even physically: I had been forcefully moved into someone else’s bedroom, where I was treated like an unwanted guest. As I aged, most of the stuff I read or watched was in English, most of the authors I admired were either native English speakers or Japanese (I’d gladly learn Japanese if I thought I was capable of becoming fluent at it), and over the years I gave up entirely on reading in my own language. However, I didn’t believe I could become proficient enough in English to write at a professional level. I wrote plenty of stuff in Spanish, but it never felt comfortable, and I found myself having to translate many thoughts into words that wouldn’t have crossed my mind.

A now defunct English writer who moved to Spain in his thirties, after I told him about these issues, shared that he had stopped reading and writing in his own language to adapt. I didn’t want to do that; I don’t feel like I have much in common with the Spanish people (or even the Basque) although I was born here, nor see much merit in most of their cultural productions. After the couple of books I tried to publish in Spanish failed catastrophically, I gave up on writing.

Long story short, I ended up writing my own stuff in English anyway. You can check out all the texts I’ve written in the last few years through my personal page. My English will never stop sounding “odd” to native English speakers, but maybe that gives my texts some freshness. Besides, Nabokov pulled it off, so why can’t I? Some people have told me that they enjoy the stuff I’m writing these days, and that’s as much success as I was ever likely to get.

Anyway, I wanted to mention three things I’ve been interested in lately. Randall Carlson posted through the After Skool channel an interesting talk about the origins of Halloween. He relies on the works of researchers from previous centuries, who had been bothered by the uncanny fact that the Day of the Dead and similarly themed festivities were celebrated pretty much in the same dates in extremely distant locations and by cultures that weren’t in contact with each other. For example, when the ancient Spanish first met the Peruvians, they realized to their astonishment that both shared the 2nd of November as the Day of the Dead. Long-dead researchers, now mostly “cancelled” due to wrongthink but whose research can be accessed at least physically, studied cultures around the world and came to the conclusion that these festivities were based on some unknown event that happened in the distant past. Randall Carlson suggests that the event is the Younger Dryas cataclysm, for which we now have lots of evidence, and the details he brings up about these cultures’ practices and beliefs suggest so. I wasn’t on board with some of his speculation, but you don’t have to agree with everything.

Leire, the deranged protagonist of my ongoing novel We’re Fucked, mentioned ages ago that if she found the drive to do so, she’d love to make a video game that was more or less a modern version of Tarn Adams’ Dwarf Fortress, but likely without all the Tolkienesque fantasy stuff. For those who don’t know, Dwarf Fortress was an artisan project that started back in 2006 by a likely autistic man, and that consisted on an extremely detailed simulation of a fantasy world. The result is hard to explain, but it became the grandfather of a whole genre of games, of which Rimworld may be the most successful modern version. However, I was never entirely on board with Rimworld, because it doesn’t feature height layers; height-based structures, mining, etc. have been so vital to human development that colony builders that don’t feature it don’t feel right to me. The creator of Rimworld argued that it would have been too computationally expensive to implement it in his game, and that whole thing bothered me so much that 3-4 years ago I went through the trouble of programming a 3D-based pathfinding algorithm myself: here’s the link. However, it was written in Python; through the process of developing that I realized how flawed the programming language is, which ended up becoming a rant in my current novel.

Unfortunately, Dwarf Fortress was so graphically unpleasant (based on ASCII characters) and with such an abysmal interface that despite its gloriousness, I hadn’t been able to get back to it in years. However, the Adams brothers have been working to modernize it and release it on Steam, and it’s coming out on the sixth of December.

The last thing I wanted to mention was Chainsaw Man. Its protagonist, Denji, is wild and deranged, and plenty of the visuals and interactions between the characters are strange and absurd. I couldn’t imagine any production company adaptating this story successfully. However, Mappa has been knocking it out of the park.

The latest episode, number four, features the fight between Denji and the Leech Devil, the first one in which we get a real sense of how unhinged and feral our boob-obsessed protagonist is. The cinematography and animation have been consistently incredible. The voice actors are giving their all as well, but that’s to be expected: the Japanese seem to have the most passionate VAs in the world. 10/10, would smell Power’s shit.

We’re Fucked, Pt. 78: AI-generated images

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial1 Comment

Some neural networks excel at recognizing patterns in data, and as if that wasn’t enough, they can extrapolate those patterns into new data. In practice, the AIs involved in this entry study images (millions, perhaps billions of them) and produce new images based on the patterns they have recognized, patterns that you wouldn’t understand even if they explained them to you. Plenty of those images are masterful paintings and compositions far better than anything you will ever create with your mess of a human brain haphazardly cobbled together by evolution, that still believes you are fleeing from predators in a savannah. That’s just how it is. Learn to use AI-generated images as inspiration, because you’ll only rage against the machine in vain.

Anyway, if the measure of density of a chapter is how many images it manages to inspire, chapter 78 of my ongoing novel We’re Fucked is hella thicc. Some of the pictures look like anime because one of the neural networks studied anime-like stuff exclusively, plenty of it perverted.

You can check out all the entries I’ve posted with AI-generated images (twenty-nine so far) through this link.

“The breeze blows on the grass and weeds like a whistling ghost.”
“Its cold seeps under my corduroy jacket and leeches the warmth from my bones.”
Mommy
Anime mommy
“[…] her ivory-white face, that hovers above me like an earthly moon.”
“Her cobalt-blues, beneath which she conceals a thousand secret fountains and grottoes, are piercing deep into my psyche as if to flush my demons out of their hiding spots.”
“I’d love to stare up in silence at this divine being for the rest of my life; any words would mar the silence.”
“Humans have to acknowledge their mental states through verbal constructs on a regular basis, to distract themselves from the certainty of their impending doom.”
“A nice glow-in-the-dark shine.”
“This Paleolithic creature deserves a bit of paradise, with food to eat, a wide-open sky, trees for shade, and grass for chewing.”
“My mind gets inundated with images of that boreal forest from which I snatched our girl.”
“Nairu’s abandoned kin must have prayed to their gods and devils to be spared from the unspeakable apocalypse that befell them.”
“I wish I could leap forward another ten thousand years and disappear from this sickening age of mass destruction and despair.”
“As Jacqueline crouches, she smooths her plaid skirt over her thighs, then she lies down sideways beside me, resting her face on her palm.”
“The close-up of her regal visage in the dark makes me feel like a cat snuggled up by a radiator.”
“I take a whiff of her fragrance, a flower garden blooming with myriad blossoms.”
“Isn’t it nice to feel the grass beneath us and hear the sound of the wind in the trees?”
“She nuzzles my nose with hers.”
“I’ll have to avoid turning into the kind of mom that forgets her daughter’s name, locks her out in the freezing rain, keeps her chained in the cellar, or hands her over to a warlord.”
The Earth becomes a burnt cinder drifting in the void.
“the zest of a dog that comes across a mud puddle in a park and rushes to turn itself into a swamp monster.”
“The wind gusts a long-ass moan through the leafless tree branches as the night takes a chillier turn.”
“The three of us huddle together like house cats napping in a wrinkled blanket.”
“My limbs feel heavy and stiff, like sacks of sand strapped to my torso.”
“I close my eyes and unmoor my mind, which has grown fuzzy with drowsiness, so that it paints on the canvas of soft blackness whatever insane spectacle it pleases.”
“The first pinkish streaks of morning light stain an ethereal sky.”
“A yellow sun appears, spreading waves of liquid gold.”
“The sky cracks open as if a projectile punched through the stratosphere.”
An angel descended from heaven.
“The beast’s leathery snout gleams with its own sticky sap.”
“When the beast lets go of the paper, it unfolds itself with a dry crackling sound and takes off like a sparrow that had gotten captured and imprisoned in a birdcage.”
“The decrepit paper flutters towards me.”
“The paper’s edges are browned and torn, and its coarse surface is sullied with bloody fingerprints, but it contains spidery handwriting in fading red ink and an archaic script.”
“My name is Dialectos, which in your language means ‘tongue.'”
“My soul is sustained by the constant stream of dark matter that suffuses every atom of the universe.”
“I enclose in my wings a tiny sliver of the blackest metal, found at the center of your Milky Way galaxy, where countless stars spin like pinwheels of fire.”
“In the realm of the unseen, you humans and other beasts are like flies upon a wall.”
“Leire, your ancestors’ bloodlines can be traced to the sphinxes that used to roam your continent like sentient wildcats.”
“[…] you kidnapped her, upending her life forever, to bring her past the barrier of the Younger Dryas apocalypse into a world of steel-boned cities.”
“A world of steel-boned cities, lightbulbs, telephones, radios, televisions, submarines, airplanes, rockets, computers, guns and atomic bombs.”
“You have violated the sanctity of time and space.”
The riverlike course of fate.
“I promise to reward you with a salary of dark matter.”
“Under your care, if the child grows into a lovely woman, your name will be inscribed in the Hall of Ancestors at her place of birth.”
The fiend that haunts the nightmares of children.
“I will cast you back in time, into a frozen cave where you’ll meet a future self.”
“That I promise and swear on the ancient blood that coats every blade of grass.”
“The paper curls itself into a bowtie, then flies away towards the dawn’s light.”
“I smile to the darkness of my mind.”
“I imagine my heart hardening to the extent that a thousand years of suffering couldn’t crack it.”
“I want to slice my head off with a kitchen knife, then hold the decapitated head in the sky so that my eyeballs and mouth, dripping red-and-green goo down on humankind’s face, could scream one thing to everyone, even those who loathe me: ‘I love you.'”

We’re Fucked, Pt. 78 (Fiction)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial3 Comments

The breeze blows on the grass and weeds like a whistling ghost. Its cold seeps under my corduroy jacket and leeches the warmth from my bones. I shiver as though I’m sitting naked on the floor of a cavern.

Jacqueline has walked up to us although she risked soiling the soles of her boots, and is towering over my supine self. Her raven-black braid is draped over the thick lapel of her peacoat, but dark indigo highlights are undulating in the windblown loose locks around her ivory-white face, that hovers above me like an earthly moon. A sweet smile settles on her rosy lips, which would feel as soft and supple as the nipples now hidden by her turtleneck sweater and by the reinforced brassiere that supports her prodigious breasts. Her cobalt-blues, beneath which she conceals a thousand secret fountains and grottoes, are piercing deep into my psyche as if to flush my demons out of their hiding spots.

I’d love to stare up in silence at this divine being for the rest of my life; any words would mar the silence. But humans have to acknowledge their mental states through verbal constructs on a regular basis, to distract themselves from the certainty of their impending doom. I wring enough energy out of my bone-tired brain to string together a few words.

“Our adopted daughter vastly overestimated my physical prowess,” I utter in a rusty voice.

Jacqueline narrows her eyes and broadens her smile. She brushes a raven-black lock away from her face.

“Sure, but she already trusts you enough to know that you would save her from a nasty fall.”

“Or maybe she’s that reckless and self-destructive.”

Jacqueline chuckles.

“That may be part of it. She has taken quite a shine to you, hasn’t she?”

“A nice glow-in-the-dark shine. Enough to travel with me across spacetime to our wretched present.”

Nairu’s warm breath is tickling the base of my neck. This Paleolithic creature deserves a bit of paradise, with food to eat, a wide-open sky, trees for shade, and grass for chewing.

My mind gets inundated with images of that boreal forest from which I snatched our girl. A lump rises to my throat. Nairu’s abandoned kin must have prayed to their gods and devils to be spared from the unspeakable apocalypse that befell them. I wish I could leap forward another ten thousand years and disappear from this sickening age of mass destruction and despair.

“More importantly now,” Jacqueline says warmly, “even in this growing cold, you two look comfortable. Don’t mind if I join you.”

As Jacqueline crouches, she smooths her plaid skirt over her thighs, then she lies down sideways beside me, resting her face on her palm. The close-up of her regal visage in the dark makes me feel like a cat snuggled up by a radiator.

“Jacqueline, thank you for everything,” I say in a strained voice that risks becoming a broken whisper. “For welcoming this new daughter of ours into your home. For being here with me in this park. For existing at all in this insane world, when most of everything has come and gone.”

Jacqueline’s eyes glimmer. She softens her gaze and blows air through her nostrils. The vaporized exhalation lingers between our faces.

She slides a hand behind my head, brushing the top of Nairu’s, to cradle my nape. My beloved leans her face down and kisses me on the lips. She pushes her tongue into my mouth while her fingers entwine themselves in my hair. I take a whiff of her fragrance, a flower garden blooming with myriad blossoms. When Jacqueline pulls away, my heart is pounding in my ears like a tribal drum.

“You’re welcome, sweetie,” she whispers. “Isn’t it nice to feel the grass beneath us and hear the sound of the wind in the trees?”

“I’ve been far worse.”

She nuzzles my nose with hers.

“It’s going to be alright, you know.”

I swallow to loosen my throat.

“As long as you’re around, I’m sure it will be fine. If you become to Nairu even a fraction of the loving mommy you are to me, she’ll be happy.”

Growing up I only integrated bad examples of motherhood, so I’ll have to avoid turning into the kind of mom that forgets her daughter’s name, locks her out in the freezing rain, keeps her chained in the cellar, or hands her over to a warlord.

Jacqueline rests her head next to mine on the grass. With the tip of her index finger, she traces the seam of my upper lip.

“And I have no intention of ever giving you up,” she says in a deep purring voice.

“E-even after ten thousand years of brutal struggles, wars, earthquakes, plagues, ice ages and extinctions? Even after the human race disintegrates, leaving only scattered tribes of primitive savages? Even after the Earth becomes a burnt cinder drifting in the void?”

She slips her lips and tongue along the rim of my ear.

“Even if you get old and wrinkly,” she murmurs in my eardrum.

Jacqueline has stirred the water in the teapot within me; as its contents heat up, they slosh around and boil, threatening to scald my internal organs. I’d love to take my clothes off then roll around naked over every inch of mommy’s skin, with the zest of a dog that comes across a mud puddle in a park and rushes to turn itself into a swamp monster.

The wind gusts a long-ass moan through the leafless tree branches as the night takes a chillier turn. Nairu slides down from my chest, squeezing my right tit through my shirt and bra, and nestles against my shoulder as if to sniff my armpit. The three of us huddle together like house cats napping in a wrinkled blanket.

My limbs feel heavy and stiff, like sacks of sand strapped to my torso. I’m slipping into a languid trance. I close my eyes and unmoor my mind, which has grown fuzzy with drowsiness, so that it paints on the canvas of soft blackness whatever insane spectacle it pleases.

The first pinkish streaks of morning light stain an ethereal sky. A yellow sun appears, spreading waves of liquid gold. But the sky cracks open as if a projectile punched through the stratosphere, that sheds its pale inner membrane down over the horizon like a dirty gauze while the culprit, a rotund creature with shaggy, burnt umber fur outlined in buttermilk-yellow light, falls towards me with leisurely gravity.

The beast’s leathery snout gleams with its own sticky sap. On either side of a chalk-white face, the roughly nostril-sized eyes, two black holes into a crumpled universe, betray the monster’s dim-witted gentleness, like that of an uncle who would always lend a helping hand and dispense morsels of dubious advice. At the end of its elongated forelimbs, the inward claws, large as dinner forks, are holding awkwardly a folded, yellowed paper.

When the beast lets go of the paper, it unfolds itself with a dry crackling sound and takes off like a sparrow that had gotten captured and imprisoned in a birdcage. The decrepit paper flutters towards me. It touches my nose, flips over and hovers in front of me, displaying its underside. The paper’s edges are browned and torn, and its coarse surface is sullied with bloody fingerprints, but it contains spidery handwriting in fading red ink and an archaic script.

I am a creature of great mystical power. My name is Dialectos, which in your language means “tongue.” My soul is sustained by the constant stream of dark matter that suffuses every atom of the universe. At the end of my feet I have four toes, and at the end of my tail, two; each of them a gigantic stiletto. I enclose in my wings a tiny sliver of the blackest metal, found at the center of your Milky Way galaxy, where countless stars spin like pinwheels of fire. I do not speak the language of men, or even the tongue of beasts, and yet my speech is known to all living creatures. In the realm of the unseen, you humans and other beasts are like flies upon a wall.

Leire, your ancestors’ bloodlines can be traced to the sphinxes that used to roam your continent like sentient wildcats, before the age of iron and steam engines. I hereby grant you full custody of Nairu, the little orphan from the Paleolithic age, who was exploring the fringes of her community when you kidnapped her, upending her life forever, to bring her past the barrier of the Younger Dryas apocalypse into a world of steel-boned cities, lightbulbs, telephones, radios, televisions, submarines, airplanes, rockets, computers, guns and atomic bombs.

You have violated the sanctity of time and space, as well as diverted the riverlike course of fate, so I shall appoint you to the job of loving the Ice Age child. Although she was born in a distant time, now she belongs to your tribe. You will feed her, bathe her, comb her hair, dress her in pink tutus and slippers, sing her lullabies, cuddle her when she has nightmares, buy her toys, stuff her face with pastries and ice cream, and teach her to play the harp. To help Nairu forget the horrors of the world that your gormless species has created, you will make her life fun and absurd. In return, I promise to reward you with a salary of dark matter.

Under your care, if the child grows into a lovely woman, your name will be inscribed in the Hall of Ancestors at her place of birth. But if you instead become the fiend that haunts the nightmares of children, I will cast you back in time, into a frozen cave where you’ll meet a future self who will ask: “Who are you?” And you shall answer: “I’m Leire, the mommy who lost her daughter.” That I promise and swear on the ancient blood that coats every blade of grass. For the next three thousand years, I shall periodically send you letters so you may remember your mission, and that I am always watching.

Signed this day, at the last hours of the eighth year of the calamity,

Dialectos.

The paper curls itself into a bowtie, then flies away towards the dawn’s light. As the paper shrinks, it ignites into a fluttering white flame against the furnace-red sphere of the sun.

I smile to the darkness of my mind, and imagine my heart hardening to the extent that a thousand years of suffering couldn’t crack it. I want to slice my head off with a kitchen knife, then hold the decapitated head in the sky so that my eyeballs and mouth, dripping red-and-green goo down on humankind’s face, could scream one thing to everyone, even those who loathe me: “I love you.”

Author’s note: the two songs for today are “路標” (“Michishirube“) and “鬼ヶ島” (“Onigashima“), both by the great Ichiko Aoba.

I keep a playlist that contains all the songs mentioned throughout this novel. Eighty-one songs so far. Here’s the link.

Two neural networks did AI stuff to render many, many pictures related to this chapter. Here’s the link.

Review: Boku to Issho, by Minoru Furuya

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Reseñas4 Comments

“Whether you’re an idiot who’s watching or an idiot who’s dancing, if you’re really an idiot, you might as well dance.”

Throughout my reading of Minoru Furuya’s Saltiness, Ciguatera, Himizu, and Wanitokagegisu (the links go to my reviews of those titles), this author became my third favorite mangaka after Inio Asano (mainly because of Oyasumi Punpun and Solanin; unfortunately the guy seems to have lost his drive since) and Shūzō Oshimi.

Furuya’s stuff tends to be similar: character-driven tales of outcasts forced to deal with bad luck and troublesome compulsions. Plenty of weird sexual stuff. Although the characters endure harrowing experiences that would have traumatized most people to the extent of ruining their lives, Furuya’s characters get used to trauma. However, the commitments between the characters tend to be equally temporary. His stories rarely include neat resolutions: unless the character in question dies, the issues that person had been struggling with throughout the story are likely to continue beyond the conclusion. The author also has a fantastic sense of the absurdity of life, so his plot points and character interactions are often unpredictable and hilarious.

This manga series I’m reviewing was made in the late nineties. A different beast to his later works, Boku to Issho is an extremely caricaturesque comedy slice-of-life. While the extreme behaviors of the characters put me off initially, as well as the author’s talent to depict ugly faces, Furuya ended up turning the caricaturesque nature of this story into an art form. It became one of the funniest series I’ve read in a long time.

The story follows two brothers (about fifteen and twelve respectively) in awful circumstances: their mother just died, and their violent stepfather booted them out. They find themselves homeless, penniless, with no talents that they can put to use. The big brother acts as a father figure to his younger sibling, but he’s lazy and delusional: although he believes that he’ll become a pro baseball player the moment he applies himself to it, he’s mainly focused in protecting his ego from the damage that testing his delusions in the real world would cause.

They quickly meet one of the other main characters of this tale: a glue-huffing orphan who makes a living by theft and petty grifting.

Later on they also get together with a pretty boy runaway teen. After the glue-huffing guy steals a cellphone, they start selling their services as gigolos. Their naïveté quickly clashes with the real world when one of their first customers turns out to be a young woman with a penchant for toy-assisted domination.

Most of the characters we meet struggle at least with their self-esteem, but often with poverty, and in some cases with compulsions and fetishes. They are rarely sure of their place in life and where they’ll be in a few years.

As mentioned, I’ve been exposed to plenty of Furuya’s works, so I already expected this story to “just end”. The author attempts some circularity, which mostly serves as the thematic point that not much in our lives gets resolved, and we’re left to figure out how to keep going.

Another winner by Minoru Furuya, as far as I’m concerned.

Life update (10/27/2022)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Slice of lifeLeave a comment

This week I’m working afternoons. I’d rather always work in the afternoon; that allows me to spend at least a couple precious hours every morning writing, which is my main preoccupation these days. I’ve already polished about a thousand words of the chapter that will conclude the current sequence.

I was supposed to go to the dentist, but she got covid. My brother and his wife got the virus as well.

These last couple of weeks, my non-writing, non-working hours have been filled with Japanese matters: Ichiko Aoba’s music, manga, and Chainsaw Man. Mappa is doing interesting stuff with the adaptation. The pacing feels a bit weird given how quickly the manga moves, but I’m enjoying revisiting the deranged exploits of our boob-obsessed, mommy-worshipping neglected boy Denji.

The following video is the ending of a single episode of the anime (the third one). I can’t imagine how much money and manpower they spent on this.

As a manga reader who’s currently following the second part of this story, it’s been real nice to see Power again.

Besides all that, I’m doing as fine as someone so mentally unstable could.