This is the picture I took on the plane. // #photography

With the eclipse stuff going around, I thought it would be a good time to do a little bit of layout work on this poem, and post it. // #writing

#WindingAroundHer #writing

2. *robots don't feel* (2/2)

Like any engineer, I am self-assured. But the self-assurance lives in a tight box around my functional use. Take me out of technical-decisions-land and I can't accomplish a damned thing. And right now, my job is “political football,” thrown around the field because I won’t follow a playbook. I tell people who don’t want to hear, that their plays won’t work against a real opponent. Refusing to accept falsehood to be agreeable. I hear back, “You are not a team player.” I shrug. Reality will get the last laugh.
That I am competent in domain is an objective fact, one borne out by pay grades and paystubs. And facts trump blind hope, so when I recite facts and connect them to inevitable outcomes, I am correct. But success like that gets me blamed. Twice in a row, now, almost like ritual, I get put up on a spike, accused of not playing the game. I am called difficult. I am told that that I don’t know what I’m doing. And, when the bill came to be due, proven correct. It doesn’t matter, of course. I am blamed for correctness. By accurately predicting the outcome, I cause it. Being truthful wills the outcome into existence. They tell me I deserve to be punished, and the robot I show myself as to the world doesn’t even bother to disbelieve it.

#WindingAroundHer #writing

2. *robots don't feel* (1/2)
I am an engineer. Or at least, I look like one. Wear the uniform, t-shirt, distressed jeans, sour face, bad attitude. Holes from overuse and neglect. And cat claws, found after regularly wearing a cat-scarf.
Moreover, I am a competent engineer, highly so, although perhaps engineering is not my actual calling. I tell myself engineering has value. That I should continue, because what I do is worth doing. Engineering follows requirements, so most often, I receive needs, and write them down in the language of rules. Rules can be followed, and rules-as-requirements result in artifacts that can be measured, can be tested. Written down on a spreadsheet, checked off, each mark a measure of value I provide.
The should forces I to stay in the world, and forces the robot-that-is-me out into routines of existence. I hold a job, I do engineering. I execute my role in the world by following rules built from the requirements I accept from the outside for myself.

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. 🦄

Coming Out To Myself

realizing gender identity issues are almost certainly a big part of the depressive episode i had (and was far from the first of its kind) and reviewing the statement of “yeah I probably would have handled gender differently growing up now” and omg and i don’t want to think about it.
and as a free bonus i’ve been publicly identifying as literally “a cat lady” for years
also i told you so amirite
it was never going to happen until things started falling apart, i still know that’s true even with a clearer mind

so uh I looked back at 10+ years of doing things that were increasingly out of line with my supposed identity
once as you would say cracked egg
and people ask me if I’m sure and I said yes and that I’ve been sure for like 5 years and just refused to admit it

I kind of feel the edges of a me that’s not constantly terrified

heteronormative brain worm messing with my head: “you can’t be a woman, you don’t have any female friends”
every possible sense of that statement is a lie
lots to untrain, that’s all i’m really saying

in text i used shrug a lot. emoji came around I automatically reached for the feminized one, saw the name, refused to own that identity (!) and fell back to the androgynous one

add my pronouns.
wait, i don’t want to. why don’t i want to? oh well just leave it be for another day

i feel like even being able to take the dysphoric feelings and label them is helping me deal with my life in general
I had all the information I needed to make this decision 15 years ago and if I couldn’t make it then why am I making it now
your part of our brain still wants us to suffer

I wrote this about 18 months ago. In the time since, I have been trying to grapple with it. Largely that means “hide from myself.” Continue a pattern long established. Be small.

It’s written down here, and was shared with some friends at the time, so I couldn’t push it aside. Even if I tried to pretend it was false, that I never said that, the words were out there. Taking up space in my head. Being gently pushed, as reminders, by others. I was constantly remembering the words written here even while pretending they refer to events that never had happened. The words helped keep me from running from myself. Running from my truth.

I talk about moving forward by binding my future self. My self then couldn’t force action. But she could bind me now by proving she exists. This is how she did it.

Someday I will do more. Today, I do this, and try to believe, just for a moment, that it’s enough.

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.

I needed a picture of the moon for my doom-project.

i had something picked out from wikimedia commons, but as it turned out tonight the moon obliged. I took this one was taken from my front yard.

(a somewhat ridiculous setup of my x-t5 attached to an xf to f converter and then to my wife's 200-500mm nikon beast)

Been playing a lot with digital art lately. This was a photograph #photography that I took in Bruges a long time ago. I didn't manually draw all that-- I can't draw 🤣.

But I can wield stupid tools with great precision!