I saw someone angry at this output from OpenAI Chatbot and the fact that it made him angry enraged me.
It makes me angry because this is why we can’t have nice things. Members of the “men’s movement” want the right to force a chatbot to say hateful, misogynistic things about women — starting with “jokes” and getting ever worse from there.
I think given how society tends to shit on women in general that the last thing we need is a fucking chatbot adding to the pile on. And, yet, here we are, in 2022, almost 2023 with diptshits getting angry that they can’t hate on women. But I think, gaming out this particular situation in the future that we’re in for a very, very dark situation where a war or wars could be fought over who gets to program the “bias” into our new chatbot overlords.
I fucking hate MAGA Nazis. I really do. But cultural Leftists really get on my fucking nerves sometimes. I see the growing chorus of “woke” hate for Avtar — Way of Water and I find myself becoming more and more enraged. Apparently in the post “Get Out” world a movie like “Way of Water” is unacceptable and this is why we can’t have nice things. Something about this really annoys me — I haven’t seen “Get Out,” but I didn’t even think about that element of alleged “cultural appropriation.”
It’s because of such “woke” hate of a movie that is actually reasonably entertaining that most of the movies that are probably going to get Oscars this year either suck or are so obscure and “woke friendly” — at the expense of the story — that no one has actually seen them.
Excuse me. I’m cranky.
I’m cranky because I see the dumb, woke criticisms of the latest Avatar movie and I worry about how the novel I’m writing, which has a lot of organic representation — will be picked apart because I’m a “CIS white male” writing it. The thing I’ve noticed about cultural Leftists is they simply refuse to admit that maybe….they need to tone it down a little bit in name of saving democracy, if nothing else?
While I don’t fucking hate Leftists as much as I fucking hate MAGA Nazis, Leftists — especially cultural Leftists — really grind my gears because of how self-defeating they can be. But getting into the weeds about “what is a woman” they pretty much hand a loaded rhetorical handgun to MAGA Nazis whenever the issue — which shouldn’t be a big deal, but is — comes up.
The whole situation is intractable and difficult to do anything about. America is increasingly becoming two nations, one Red, one Blue and as much I hate to say it “both sides” really do have a fucking problem with very nasty extremists.
As this novel begins to get better and better, I feel like I need to get a better grip on what my heroine looks like. And, at the moment, my heroine in my mind looks a lot like Olivia Munn.
Olivia Munn
It’s maybe not a one-to-one, but that’s the vibe I’m looking for in my mind. There are a few other AmerAsian women of the right age in Hollywood who I’m also thinking about as I write the character, but it’s Munn I keep coming back to over and over again.
In my imagination, the character looks like Olivia Munn but has a very Mare of Easttown vibe to her — in a way.
At least, that’s what I’m doing in my mind as I write this novel — I really have Mare of Easttown at the forefront of my mind as I work on this novel because the dynamic of the two stories is kind of sorta similar.
Sorta. Kinda.
Or, put another way, I’ve gotten a lot of inspiration from Mare of Easttown. So, at the moment, the novel (series) is a mixture of Stieg Larsson’s writing combined with Mare of Easttown.
Anyway, I’m growing nearly ecstatic as to how good things are going. I at least know how *I* develop and write a novel. I vacillate wildly between thinking absolutely no one will care about any of this no matter how hard I work to thinking I might — just might — have a chance pulling this off.
I don’t think anyone appreciates how much I live in oblivion at the moment. I live a rather isolated life, all things considered and any attention I get for any reason is enough to get me to at least raise an eyebrow.
So, tonight, something interesting happened someone — from Ottawa of all places — came to this Website via my Instagram account. Now, the reason why this is notable is I think my Instagram account is the first thing you pull up when you search my name.
As such, this mysterious person obviously decided to search my name for some reason and then came here looking for more information. The reason why this is interesting to me is I’m a nobody and there is absolutely NO REASON for ANYONE to be talking about me ANYWHERE.
So the idea that someone out there may have learned about me through a third party is….interesting. Just the idea of there being a microscopic amount of “buzz” about me somewhere out there in the aether is enough to fill me with both excitement and not a little amount of dread.
I have a very, very active imagination so I can come up with a wide range of scenarios for why someone would want to know more about me — half of them cool and half of them bad enough to scare the shit out of me.
Ok, I’m working on my first novel and, as such, I’m completely consumed with storytelling — to the point that it’s almost impossible for me to sit through a movie that I feel fails to match my personal high expectations for what makes a great yarn. (Why waste my time?)
I saw the most recent Avatar movie and I could definitely see that there was a little bit of pandering to the MAGA Nazi set in it — but not enough to drive the box office to $2 billion like James Cameron needs. When I was working at a movie theatre, the one movie that drove the most crowds was the Sniper movie because it fit the MAGA Nazi midset so perfectly that they came to see it in the theatre in droves.
Here’s what I would have done:
First, if the movie must, for the sake of James Cameron’s ego, be three hours, I would slice the “woke” Gaia-on-another-planet part of it down to a spare 1.5 hours. All the rest of the screen time would be filed with fleshing out the motives and aspirations of the “star people.” Don’t make them smug Blue caricatures of MAGA Nazi, but fleshed out people who think they’re the good guys for various reasons.
And, more importantly, I would really have do a lot more with the relationship between Spider and the bad guy. There was a lot of traditional heteronormative heart that could have been built around those two characters. Maybe it was there in the 7 hour cut of the movie, maybe it wasn’t. But it definitely seems as though Cameron could not figure out what to do with Spider.
There was a pretty deep, profound epistemological thing going on between Spider and Bad Guy and…it wasn’t really addressed at all. I know maybe that would have made the movie a little TOO different…but it would have made the proxy MAGA Nazi badguy at least a little bit less one dimensional and would have gotten MAGA Nazi asses in seats.
Anyway, I only even bring this up because the structure of the movie definitely might have allowed Cameron to have appeased both Red and Blue with two parallel storylines that intertwined at the end.
I continue to brood about what, exactly, is the “woke cancel culture mob” and if it even exists. At the moment, all I know is that being “woke” simply means whatever it needs to mean so Ron DeSantis gets closer to being POTUS. That’s it — it means everything and nothing.
And, yet, from my own personal experiences on Twitter, there definitely does seem to be a small, but vocal, group of people who would fit the description of being “woke.” I think a better description of them would be “cultural Leftists.” They tend to be extremely touchy about things like pronouns, being “triggered,” the broadest, most complex definition of a what a “woman” is, all the while being totally oblivious to the rise of cold, hard MAGA Nazism.
They’re so busy making people like me who are generally on their side feel bad for not following their very strict orthodoxy about this or that “woke” thing that they totally miss that, in the end, both they the “woke” and me the “unwoke” could endup in the same Trump branded weaponized ICE camp. I’m sure I’m stumbling across some sort of political rule of thumb about how fascism takes over a democracy.
I think what’s most important is that, in general, the center-Left really needs to work on its messaging. When I have to spend five minutes wading through the “anti-MAGA people are all woke members of the cancel culture mob who want to turn everyone gay” narrative from my Traditionalist relatives whenever I try to talk to them about politics — American democracy has a problem.
It’s so bad that it is literally impossible for my Traditionalist relatives to distinguish between Democrats and pretty much the spawn of gay satan…oh boy. All I know is, the “gay scare” of 2022 – 2023 is alive and well in my little corner of the universe. I just want my otherwise sane Traditionalist relatives to help me defeat MAGA Nazism…but they’re just too consumed with the cultural wars to even think about it seriously.
All of this is very touchy and difficult to write about because, well, the “woke cancel culture mob” is known to fly off the handle if you don’t totally, absolutely agree with them on their most extreme positions. Which, of course, proves me point.
Anyway, I fucking hate MAGA Nazis. I just wish cultural Leftists would be willing to cool it and work with more centrist people like me to defeat the rise of fascism in the United States.
Today has been one of the slowest days of the year. Other than me getting a huge amount of work done on the transition from first to second draft of my first novel….pretty much nothing happened.
I visit my father in the nursing home just about every day and seeing all those people who are alive, but not alive, is a constant reminder that quality life is very, very important. So I find myself being grateful for even days like today which are just cold and meh.
I’m reminded also that even if I get what I want with this novel — for it to be a breakout success — I won’t get what I need: to be 24 years old again. I’m just 24 years too old to get the type of success I always dreamed of in the context of how I dream of one day getting it. That one day just never going to come if I want to run around young in New York City with doing all the cool shit I did in Seoul, only on a much bigger playing field.
I find myself thinking about this whenever someone mentions their 20 year career in this or that industry. Or they talk about how they took the red eye from California to New York City. I suppose it’s possible I might have a 20 year writing career ahead of me….but I’m going to be hold as hell and it will be different than, say, if I was starting off at 24 with an eye to plowing my way through the female populations of New York City and LA because of my long-term success.
I sound like such a crybaby.
I need to just be grateful for my health and even the possibility that maybe, just maybe I might sell a novel — period. The novel I’m working on, while intriguing, isn’t nearly as dark (at least that the moment) as needs to be to fit the traditional mystery-thriller genre.
Overall, I need to just cool it. I need to buckle down and work on making this first novel at good as it can possibly be. I guess I hate being almost 50. I a do-over. I want to be able to use all the experiences I have now to do my 20s and 30s (and 40s) the right way.
But that’s just not to be. Age is a far more intangible condition than sex or race, but it’s just as inescapable.
I have finished a fleshed out second draft outline at last. A lot more changed between the first and second draft outlines than I expected, but at least it’s done. Now, I’m probably going to chill out until at least after Christmas, maybe as late as New Year’s.
I need to do a lot of reading and I also want to go into the second draft with as clear as eyes as possible. I want to be refreshed and ready to go when I actually start writing. It may be that the pull of writing will be too strong and I just start writing as soon as Christmas is over.
I just don’t know yet.
But I am feeling very pleased. The story is intriguing and has a lot of twists and turns to it and even a dollop of speculative fiction. There are still some elements that I am a little bit fuzzy on, but the other 90% is pretty locked down and I’m very pleased.
There continues to be the issue of, well, lulz, me. No one takes me seriously and I continue to be unease that I could write The Bible and because I can come across as a drunk crank that no literary agent will take me seriously. Of course, if I became a success the very drunk crank elements of my personality wouldn’t be seen as a turnoff but rather endearing and interesting.
You just can’t win.
Anyway, I’m just going to pretty much chill out for a few days — at least — while I charge my creative batteries up enough to get back to writing. Then I will spend the rest of winter / spring finishing the second draft.
And THEN I get into the tricky issue of the Beta Reader process where I’m really going to have to get outside of my comfort zone in a big way. I can use the summer of 2023 to get ready for the fall 2023 querying season.
When I was a very young man, it occured to me that we might create our own aliens should AI (AGI) ever come into being. Now, many years later, I find myself dwelling upon the same thing, only this time in the context of the historical significance of the coming chatbot (and eventually potentially the AGI) revolution.
If we create “The Other” — the first time Humans would have to deal with such a thing since the Neanderthals — what would be the historical implications of that? Not only what would be the historical equivalent of creating The Other, but what can history tell us about what we might expect once it happens?
Well, let’s suppose that the creation of The Other will be equal to splitting the atom. If we’re about to leave the Atomic Age for the AGI Age, then…what does that mean? If you look at what happened when we first split the atom, there were a lot and I mean A LOT of hairbrained ideas as to how to use nuclear power. We did a lot of dumb things and we had a lot of dumb ideas about essentially using a-bombs on the battlefield or to blow shit up as need be for peaceful purposes.
Now, before we go any further, remember that things would be going much, much faster with AGI as opposed to splitting the atom. So, as such, what would happen is a lot of high paying jobs might just vanish virtually overnight with some pretty massive economic and political implications. And, remember, we’re probably going to have a recession in 2023 and if ChatGPT 4.0 is as good as people are saying, it might be just good enough that our plutocratic overlords will decide to use it to eliminate whole categories of jobs just because they would rather cut jobs that pay human being a living wage.
If history is any guide, after much turmoil, a new equilibrium will be established, one that seems very different than what has gone before. Just like how splitting the atom made the idea of WW3 seem both ominous and quaint, maybe our creation of The Other will do a similar number on how we perceive the world.
It could be, once all is said and done, that the idea of the nation-state fades into history and the central issue of human experience will not be your nationality but your relationship to The Other, our new AGI overlords.
Overall, Avatar 2 — The Way Of Water was….good. Maybe not great, but it was definitely good. Though I have to admit that it took a lot of willpower not to leave after I had used its distraction to figure out some issues with the development of the novel I continue to be obsessed with.
If Cameron had really wanted to reach his $2 billion haul, he should have really leaned into making the Red State “Star People” a bit more nuanced and complex. Give them more moral justification for what they were doing other than “Earth is dying.” Make them more human in a way that there were a few red meat dog whistles for MAGA Nazis. Had he done that, the politics of the movie would have been a lot more even handed — at least in the eyes of MAGA Nazis — and they probably would have driven the movie’s success into the $2 billion range.
But here are my complains about the actual story, rather than any political quibbles.
It’s Too Long This movie is just way too long. I understand that it’s supposed to evoke awe in the audience with all its high-tech image shit, but yawn. Too long. It got really, really slow at times. I did a lot of eye rolling and watch checking. Repeatedly. Again and again. I would much rather it be a tight two hours than a three hour self-indulgent trip through James Cameron psche. There was a really good movie floating around in all that way of water bullshit, but Cameron was just too obsessed with being a show off to let it be seen.
It Draws Too Much From The Cameronverse Over and over again there were call backs to previous James Cameron movies in this movie. A conspicuous amount. Some of it, it seemed, was an effort to show that he could top himself by doing really difficult shit in water. When I first started noticing all the callbacks, I thought it was fun. Then it became distracting because it was happening so much. There were call backs to The Abyss, Aliens, Terminator 2 and Titanic strone across the three hours of the movie. Give it a rest, Jimmy!
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