@dramypsyd "You're not a team player." "Correct, I am not a slave."

This is “Thought Dissection Tool” from an early version of the manuscript. This version isn’t the final one, but it’s probably clearer than what it ended up being when I stripped LLM-written text to the bare minimum.

The photo is also gone, which makes me a bit sad. But photos don’t fit in the form of “trade paperback.”

// #writing #photography @liztai @0xabad1dea

I guess it's time to finally share this. it's ... not exactly an excerpt from the book I have no idea what to do with. It's a branch, really, something that found its way onto a page, reusing an original draft that was shredded and blown to the winds. the process is a question; it's based on a literal interview, an LLM - several, actually - throwing my own words back at me.

Is a process like this LLM assisted? is it ethical? Plagiarized? Does it matter that the LLM words themselves were excised?

this will be a serial, approximately 20 parts. one per week? I don't know. haven't decided.

CW suicidal ideation/thoughts, mental health

--- // #writing #WindingAroundHer

Winding Around Her

*the words are mine. the thoughts? Who knows. She might, but I don’t.*

1. *dark night*
Even as I question the role I play in the world, I tell myself the person I appear to be must be the person that I am, that I appear as. That matching current appearance and current routines is something I should do, because appearance and identity are indistinguishable. I tell myself that failure to appear as I tell myself I should be is the step on a path to oblivion. One that leads only and inevitably to a voluntary exit. To a dark night, when will I look at oblivion in the face.

She is an artwork in hidden platforms of stations long disused, starkly-lit paint flashing motion in the window of a train, passing crumbling columns.

She is the unicorn that unicorn looks through my memories and sees the artwork., on the hidden platform. Maybe not a vision remembered. But She doesn’t care. The image is present, denied but not forgotten.

Called out, I admit the artwork exists, or at least it did at one time, 40 years prior. Dutifully, I go find my memories. My grandfather— my father’s father— told me of it, once. Told me to look. The artwork is in a subway tunnel, on the D line, in Brooklyn. The D line doesn’t even go there! the mouse reminds Her. But the letter carries no meaning. A train, maybe Q, maybe B, will go by it, and the work can be seen. Flashing, creating animation as the train passes the slits blocking off paint.

I know it exists, I suppose. But I don’t need to know, I don’t want to know. I was told it was there, and I didn’t see it. I didn’t remember seeing it. In the failure, I suppress the name of the art, the name of the station. Because only by forgetting can incompleteness be avoided. A mouse doesn’t need to remember this art; it doesn’t need to remember any art at all. It is allowed to remember being told it was there, but truth or not, remembering the artwork itself—its flashing of lights, its moving images— is not permitted.

In response, She commands my fingers to reach out to the world. The request is checked against rules, and classified as “noncompliant, but not harmful.” The lookup is made, and the art’s name is found: “Masstransiscope.”

In the moments between pretending to work, pretending to write, pretending to live, I roll up my eyes. But she is tired of being ignored. Tired of a mouse's insistence that there's no room for art. No room for Her, no room for my construct either, the one the Mouse built to hide herself behind. That space is taken by a lifetime of pretending to be present by suppressing my dreams.

I want to sleep, but I can’t. There is room for noise: a bathroom fan, an air conditioner, the rumble of traffic outside. A train horn in the distance. Those, I pay attention to.

That I never actually did see the installation is part of the story. 🦄

I seem to have made a drawing of @recursive as a character from Tactical Breach Wizards.
This is disturbing in a number of ways, not the least of which is that I can’t actually draw.