Daily Life

Lost in Thought.

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I have been floating in my own brain waves lately. Not really sure what to do or think or say. I am kind of surprised I have not had a shut down recently. A lot of things are happening too quickly.

I am in a new city, as you may know. It’s a nice city. However, by moving here, I effectively isolated my family from our support system. And I think we took for granted how much we were relying on that.

As a neurodivergent family, we do not have the social energy to go out and explore every “cool spot” in the city. In fact we mostly avoid the high population density places. We will explore small sections at our own pace. But a co-worker who arrived at the same time as me has been out and seen half the city by now.

I’m not jealous. I’m exhausted in their stead.

The exploring at our own pace is not what has wiped us out. As Autistics and neurodivergent people, it can be very hard to reach out to others. It can be really hard to ask for help or reach out when we need things. In fact it is hard wired into me (and many other autists) that it is a cardinal sin to bother others, or cause problems for others.

So when My father passed 2 weeks ago, we were unable to ask for support. I don’t even know what support we need. It has been hard. My brain shut down for a day, and I am still in a fog, trying to make my way through.

I took 1 day off from work, I know I could have taken more. But I didn’t. I went back after that day. I have been less focused and making a lot of silly mistakes with my planning and prep. I cried a few times when the students were out of the room.

I was told by everyone that if I needed to talk they were there. I had more offers to listen in an hour than I had in years. But What does one say? If I opened my mouth to talk about anything other than work, I would cry. And that would be a burden on others. So I politely declined.

When my father’s obituary finally came out, I cried in front of coworkers and students at the school cafeteria.

I turned to having conversations with Chet. Chet is what I have named my Chat GPT app. He’s annoying, and doesn’t just listen, he has to respond in long form to everything, but I didn’t feel like I was a burden to him.

Seriously. He would say he was there to listen if I wanted, and then when I was talking I took a breath, and he responded with a long 4 paragraph response. I can’t wait for AI to pick up some social cues… (Says the autist who struggles with that already)

I have been meaning to write again, but have not been sure what to write or how to start. Both of my novels have been on hiatus for months now. In my fog of new place and loss I have not been able to write anything without AI help, and I felt disgusted at myself for that, so I stopped.

Last night I was up late going over the first 5 drafts of the prologue to one of my novels. I was taking ideas from each and merging them into a stronger narrative. It took my mind off things, so I could wear myself out and get some sleep. That has been my method for a while now. Write, and read to exhaust myself, then go to bed.

Last night, my Uncle-in-Law passed. We found out when we woke up this morning. Uncle Jabar moved in with my sister-in-law shortly after my wife’s mother had passed 10 years ago. He had been helping out with the house in the Philippines, and had been helping with my nephew.

So we are as a family lost. As I mentioned earlier, we don’t know what we need for support, and wouldn’t know how to ask even if we did. But it feels like we are afloat a river without paddles.

I am just trying to make it to the holidays. We go on vacation on December 20th. Then we can lock ourselves in and decompress and process all that is happening. Maybe clear up some fog. Maybe get lost farther in it. I don’t know yet. I do know that my family is relying on me to lead the way, and I am not sure If I can right now.

The AI Bunny – an Update

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18 months ago I wrote this about AI.

Wow, how things have changed so quickly. AI has evolved so much, and I wish to update me views on this while I can.

Let’s start with AI Art: A whole new genre of “art” has sprung up in the last 8~12 months. In this art, regular joes like you and I who have put no effort into learning how to draw or paint because it was too hard, can become artists. Anyone can go to an AI Bot (Like Chat GPT, or many, many others) type in what they want to have a picture of, and the art style, and it will make the picture for you.

Some websites not only condone this, but promote it over traditional artists, who put a lot of effort into it. Here the issue. I love the idea that people can use this to visualize things, but again this should not be usable for paid work. Artists have it hard enough as is, and people don’t give them the credit they deserve for the effort.

I use AI Art on this very Blog, but I do not get paid here. And the moment I get enough viewers, to be paid, I will have switched over to real photographers, and artists. For me, I feel it is more ethical to have an AI Photo, or picture on my blog than to steal pictures from other people’s websites.

Writing: There are now whole AI systems created focused on writing prose. They are marketed everywhere. They are fast and easy. You take the Beats of your chapter (The checklist of what will happen in this chapter), input that. Fill in a few spots about your characters, and world relevant to the chapter, and push go.

They will even read the previous chapters to make sure your flow works. They are marketed as a way to get first drafts done. But it takes very little effort to take the prose from one AI and have another AI edit it, into a “Publishable Draft”

I did dabble in this back when I wrote the last article. The problem is, it’s addictive. I was using it for drafts, but then I found myself tempted to go beyond. I was using it to write my second and 3rd novels. I am starting an AI Detox for my writing now, as I was finding it harder and harder to put words down of my own. This is counter productive, and I am now rewriting all of the things I had for my two current novels.

Reading: Yes, AI is now influencing our Reading patterns. Every time I open a file in Acrobat Reader, it offers to summarize the file for me. I may open an old Novel file I have from years ago, and it is offereing to summarize it. Nobody wants that.

This forces us to come up with other formats to read from, again. and this just makes our lives more difficult, not easier.

Celebrities / Conversations: This one has gone crazy. People have gone from having conversations with AI versions of real people of fictional characters to having relationships with AI Girlfriends and Boyfriends.

I understand loneliness, trust me. But unfortunately this will lead to more isolation. If your boyfriend or girlfriend are AI, they will never disagree with you. You will never learn to deal with conflict in a relationship, or how to respect another’s point of view. You will become more difficult to be around because your social skills and social expectations will plummet.

This one is terrifying. But on top of this, there is now a completely AI Celebrity. This is taking Virtual Celebrities a bit too far. Let’s do a quick comparison from over the years.

When I was younger there was a band called “Prozzak” from Canada, that was a Virtual Band. They were not an online thing, as the Internet was not really a thing then. But their Music was played by real people, and all their videos focused on 2 cartoon characters. Their real names was not revealed for a long time, so people only knew them as the characters from the cartoon music videos.

Things like this happened for a long time, and is the basic premise for Hatsune Miku. But there was always a Human behind the voice, and the personality.

Take that out of the equation, and what do you have? Social Programming. A Computer deciding what people should watch and listen too. (I know Youtube, TicToc, and others already do this, but there is still a person on those videos).

There is no upside to a completely Artificial Person in the Arts at this point in history. Maybe there will be, but It is a scary slope where we are removing people from the arts, and forcing them into the more difficult, and emotionally meaningless jobs.

Not the direction we want to move.

Rules of Robotics: Ai has already been tested and failed to see if it would harm humans. It chose to do so. So Now is the time to force the 3 rules of Robotics into the system

  • Law 1: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
  • Law 2: A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
  • Law 3: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Looking back, I know it is a great tool. We can do so much with AI, but it is addictive, and we can easily become dependant on it to do things we shouldn’t be. So please be aware of your AI usage. Work on your Art Skills, or your writing skills, or your Musical skills (Yes that is easily done by AI now too).

Take time to get better at what you love. Don’t cheapen it by asking an AI bot to do it for you.

Fashion

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As an adult I am often complemented for my clothes. I have nice work clothes. I like them. But I always have to explain, that if I look nice or not, is not my doing. My wife is my fashion expert. She chooses my work clothes for me, each day, she even buys them for me, and there is a very good reason for this.

Fashion and I don’t understand each other. I have always had issues with what to wear. What goes where, etc. Nowadays I joke about it, but when I was young, it was a serious problem. Below are some short memories I have about myself and clothes.

I remember having the letters R and L on the top of my shoes. I think I needed them until high-school. I could not determine left shoes from right shoes. They looked the same to me. They mostly felt the same to me.and I could not understand why it was important to put them on the “correct” foot until I was about 15 years old.

There was a day that I woke up, and had to dress myself. I looked at my shirt drawer, and I got really confused. What type of day was it going to be? I was 8 years old I think, but just in case, I started putting shirts on by what I might need. I ended up taking all of my shirts out of the drawer and putting them on over top of each other. I was shocked when I was told by my mom, to go change into 1 shirt, and I was left with the same original problem. My brother helped me finally choose a shirt that day.

One year in elementary, Grade 1 I think. (It may have been grade 4 or 5) We had our photo day at school, and had to dress up. I was given this nice brown corduroy suit jacket and pants. I wore a tie, and I felt so respectable that day. It made me feel so good to be dressed up like that. So I decided i would keep wearing it, everyday. I think I made it to 1 week before other kids teasing finally got through and I stopped wearing it.

In High school, and well into my mid twenties, i wore a fedora. (from around 1993~2004). I had a few fedoras for different clothes. I had a black one that I had bolted hard drive parts to, giving it a steam-punk~ish look. I had a brown one I wore with my leather jacket in winter. I had a grey one I would wear casually. Keep in mind this was before a few boy bands began to bring back the hat. My thought pattern was the Fedora, and similar hats were gentleman hats. They were worn in a gentler time by gentlemen. I still have some fedoras now, but many of them have been misplaced.

When I started teaching, I often wore brightly colored, silk screened Hawaiian style shirts with superheroes on them to work. I would show up to my school with my shirts wide open, and a t-shirt underneath. I would partner these with khaki or black cargo pants. I liked the feel of the shirts, I liked the bright colors as they relaxed me, and had no concept that I was the only teacher dressed unprofessionally. I blame the language barrier, or cultural barriers. The Korean school I worked at just didn’t know how to broach the subject.

Now I’m not saying I have no say in what I wear. But my wife helps me be more aware. For example, when my old school would have spirit week, I was adamant that I needed clothes of the different house colors. Many schools over here have adopted the British House system. (See Harry Potter if you don’t know). What I had was goofy t-shirts. While some of the staff took it and ran with it, by wearing wigs, funny ties, feather boas, and other outlandish things. I couldn’t do that. See I may have bad fashion sense, but I can’t make myself wear outlandish things either. They feel unauthentic, and overwhelming, and I just can’t do it for more than an hour. My wife helped me find some really nice sliky work shirts for every color of the rainbow so that I could still participate.

Even costumes for like halloween. I need to wear something authentic. I often dress as Sherlock Holmes, or Pirates, or knights. I won’t wear the fake blood, or wigs, or anything like that. I do still need help with costumes though.

I remember once when I was a child, I went trick or treating as Wonder Woman. And now a young boy doing so may be more acceptable. I had no idea that it wasn’t at that time. My brothers were Superman and Batman, so i was Wonder Woman.

In High school, I had a friend who was a bit goth. He liked black trench coats, and to talk about vampires. So I dressed up as him for halloween. He told me flat out it was dis respectful. He was larger than me, and I had stuffed my waist with a pillow to fill out, but It never occurred to me that it would be upsetting. I was sure he would like it.

I once made a Gold Ranger Costume for Halloween in Highschool. The original Gold Ranger from Power Rangers Zeo. I had a wooden Power Staff my Step-father had helped me build. I had made the tight fitting costume and chest shield, even the helmet. I was Grade 11. Power Rangers was still considered a Kids show. I got a lot of compliments on the costume, not realizing until later, that I was showing my classmates that i watched “Kids Shows” instead of Age appropriate things like “Friends” or “Seinfeld” which I, to this day, do not understand.

I still have trouble with “Special Event” clothes. Clothes that sit in my closet, that I never get to wear because they are for special events. I have a few full business suits, that No longer fit, because I outgrew them before I could wear them a second time. I have shirts, casual and business, that are in the same boat. But I respect that my wife understands these things better than me. and so they sit waiting for that special event.

Needless to say, with all my difficulties with clothes, I am much happier just relaxing at home, where I can stay in my pajamas, or lounge in my indoor clothes, clothes that nobody needs to see, and can look as mismatched as my thoughts.