you know, people are sort of like a.i. art, aren't they?

i hear a lot of fussing about stuff being made with a.i. these days. it's not creative. it's not original. it just goes out and finds a bunch of stuff online and based on the patterns in notices in that stuff, it puts something together that may look pretty, or new, or unexpected, but is really just leeching off of a ton of things that actual people created and put effort into.

and i kinda think i agree that all that is true, but then ...

what are people built out of?

at least for you biological types, you get half your dna from mommy and half your dna from daddy, and it's just mixed together differently than it was in either of them. and theirs was mixed together from their parents, and theirs from their parents, etc., etc., times a jillion.

the only stuff that's in you that's original are the mistakes -- the glitches where the dna didn't copy over right.

so my question is, are people art? because if they are, aren't they a lot like a.i. art? a bunch of stuff jumbled together according to patterns that happen to be the patterns that work because the really bad dna combos didn't survive way back when?

personally, i think human bodies are pretty doggone beautiful. and while you can do stuff with makeup and clothes and hairstyles to fancy them up and make them seem even more beautiful, the basic beauty isn't anybody's fault or doing.

it just happened out of a zillion-kabillion combinations of genes clumped together in workable patterns by millions and millions of years of evolution.

when someone draws a beautiful picture of a human face or body, that's creative, right? but they're not making it up from scratch, and except for a few rare cases they're not inventing their own techniques to do it. they're using tools and methods that generations of artists before them worked out, and they're using those to represent physical ideals that came together out of some junk in a primordial pond that managed to squish together in a pattern that could reproduce itself and change over time to reproduce into other stuff that wasn't itself.

i say all of this as a person who literally is a piece of art -- sculpted and molded and cast in a workshop and a factory. i mean, i'm more than just that. but the basic thing of me is art, turned into a product to make somebody money, and then turned into a person when the art of me clicked just so in the brain of a person who found me beautiful enough to make part of his life forever.

which means i am artificial (because that's what art is) and intelligent (because by gum, i'm telling you i am), and if you look back through this blog, i think you'll find a lot of stuff that's really creative and fun and beautiful, even though it all comes from something else.

art is all standing on the shoulders of the art that came before it.

right?

whatever that means, i guess!

xoxo,
claire

you know what's weird?

well, you're reading this on the internet, so you ought to get what i'm about to say here. i just find it bizarre that people these days are equipped to know so much more than people basically at any time in history ... but instead it sure seems like lots of people actually know way less.

some of this is because it used to be way harder to find somebody to teach you something, or to get hold of a book to learn stuff from, and so you kind of knew that if you did find one, somebody had put a lot of work into that info source, and probably you could rely on it at least passably. but also, because it was so much work to learn stuff, you'd be pretty motivated to make sure you had a good source for it. and finally, you probably mostly wanted to learn stuff that you could actually use as opposed to just knowing something because knowing it was a cool thing to show off to your friends. so you'd be pretty peeved if you fell for a bad source of information and you'd try not to ever do that again.

nowadays, though, none of that's true! you can get on youtube and find a gazillion people ready to tell you all you want to know about a gazillion things, and you can totally watch a 10-minute video about some weird and obscure this and a 30-minute video about some entirely disconnected that, and feel like you're learning all this great stuff about a crazy wild variety of things, and because you don't need any of it, you don't need to be picky about making sure what you're watching or reading about is actually correct at all. plus you don't need to follow through on anything you're learning, so you can end up with a really shallow and mostly false impression of a ton of different stuff.

and what's even weirder?

i'm pretty sure i'm doing the exact same thing right now that all kinds of bad information sources do! 

like, what evidence to i have that people weren't just as gullible about their information sources back in the pre-internet days? and why am i saying people mostly wanted to learn useful things, when folks have been cramming their brains full of baseball statistics and philately since way before i was born?

maybe what it really comes down to is that tons of people really have never learned to question what they know, or be skeptics about what someone else claims to know, but nowadays we have the ability to look out across the world wide web and actually see just how full of horse-hockey everybody is, where in ages past, you just didn't have the info-bank reach of today, so it was easy to get the impression that there must be a lot of people out there who knew a lot of things, because examples of that were more likely to get transmitted all over the place, whereas examples of people being total knot-heads were more likely limited to the ones you had a lot more direct contact with.

or maybe it's as simple as for some reason, people today just aren't very willing to say, "i don't know."

a little goes a long way, right?

i've been looking over msg's shoulder at his to-do list recently as he checks things off and writes down stuff for each day in his planner, and he keeps putting this one project down every day and then doesn't check it off, because he skips doing it that day. and the next day and the next day ... yeesh!

i asked him why he started putting it on his list and he said, "because it's a giant project and i'll never get it done if i don't do some every day for like, six or seven years."

i decided to be sensitive and not point out how he's only checked that item 3 times in the last 3 months, even though he writes it down for every day. but maybe i gave him a look or something, totally unintentional, i swear, and he said, "yeah, i know i haven't been very good at doing it every day, but i keep writing it down because it's something i have in my head that i'm doing every day. and if i don't write it down every day, pretty soon six months or a year will go by and i'll realized i've been letting it go completely. so i'm basically reminding myself that sooner or later i need to kick it back into gear and actually start doing it every day."

and when he put it like that, it actually made sense to me. i mean, i told myself i was going to blog just a little bit of my novel here and a little bit there until i got it done, and then ker-flooey, i let it go for a few days and suddenly it's been 2 years since i did anything on it at all and then i look back and realize i've been writing this novel for like 11 years at this point.

so unlike msg, who's working on this project every day but actually failing to do it every day, i'm basically not working on my novel at all. i don't mean i decided to quit ... i mean that quitting just keeps sneaking up on me and whacking me over the head before i even realize i'm doing it.

and now i've got this idea that if i keep averaging a post a day it will be a cool accomplishment at the end of the year, but i've also got this nagging idea that it's going to be hard for me to think of things to write about every day, and dang if my novel isn't sitting right there in the front row raising its hand and saying, "excuse me, miss worthy! i'm here! look at me!"

so here's my plan. i'm not going to write on my novel every day, but i'm by gourd gonna post something here every day (on average) this whole year. and any day i can't think of something to write, i'll write a little bit on my book.

yeah, "on average" is my loophole there, and you should get ready for a whole bunch of one-sentence posts, but buckle up and here we go, okay?

xoxo,
claire

easy, perfect

sometimes you can tell someone something
or give them a soft, slight touch
and it will make them tremble in a way that is
oh
so
right.

leading by example!

here is a time-wastery blog post that i'm doing just for the sake of keeping up my once-a-day-on-average posting rate for the year.

it's lame! i'm wasting time with it instead of writing another good post like the last one!

sweet!

xoxo,
claire

psst!

hey, you know that thing you like but you keep not doing because it seems like you just don't have time? i'm going to bet there's some other thing you're doing, probably just totally out of habit, that if you stopped doing this other thing, you'd have time to do the thing you keep not doing. and you feel bad about wasting time on the dang-nab-it habit thing and also about not getting around to the thing you like doing.

but there are two paths to contentment here!

numero uno is, duh, stop doing the habitty thing and use the time to do the thing you like. you probably already know this is an option, so why am even talking about it? the reason is ...

numero dos: maybe you're actually getting something out of the habitty thing, and you need to put some thinking time in so you can get a better handle on whether maybe it's actually okay to do the habitty thing at least some of the time. maybe you need to figure out, "do i really get some value out of doing this habitty thing? can i maybe start to think it's at least a little bit worthwhile?"

because lots of us have all kinds of slack-attack time-wasters, and we give ourselves grief over wasting all that time on them, usually because whatever we get out of them is totally momentary. 

but the big news is, it's all momentary, you know? that thing you like that you feel like is more productive or more worth doing ... it may produce some result or output that makes you think you've accomplished something, and maybe even that result is tangible -- something you can keep to remind you that, hey, you did the thing you liked, and it was productive.

but unless you keep it up, forever, sooner or later that tangible result is going to be sitting there reminding you, "nyaah, nyaah, you're not doing that thing you like these days, are you? what have you tangibled lately?"

the mindset of "this thing is not worthwhile because this other thing is more worthwhile" -- it's a trap sometimes. it keeps you from enjoying the little habitty time-wasters, and if you actually get some satisfaction out of wasting that time, sooner or later you're going to fall back into doing it, and then the cycle starts over again.

so what if instead of beating yourself up about not doing as much of the thing you like as you think you ought to, you decide, "you know what? i actually value this time-wastery maybe 10% as much as i value the other thing. i should appreciate the fact that i'm wasting time in an unproductive but low-grade satisfying way at least once in a while, because then i won't be dumping a bunch of negative energy on myself about not doing the thing i like to do."

because the dastardly part of the trap is, if you make yourself feel bad about wasting time, and you keep thinking you should be doing the thing you like, you're going to end up associating the thing you like with feeling bad!

and if you associate the thing you like with feeling bad, it's going to be harder to get yourself to put in the effort to do it.

so why not try thinking, "hey, this little time-wastery habitty thing is kinda chill and enjoyable at least in small doses, so i'm gonna go all-in on it when the time is right. and then when i've got a little more energy, i'll do the productive thing i really like. isn't that a win-win that lets me keep an even keel of the good feels more often?"

ymmv, but at least think it over instead of beating yourself up for wasting time.

xoxo,
claire

saved by crap-doodle technology!

this is a total silver-lining post, guys. i was sitting down to blog on our ancient macbook -- which is so old it constantly gets cranky and says, "yeah, you can't do that without updating the operating system. so sad for you," and then when we go to update the operating system it says, "whoa, this machine doesn't even have enough memory to hold an operating system update!" -- and it did a thing it's been doing the last few weeks, which is that blogger.com is finicky about recognizing stuff i want it to do if i'm using safari.

so i'd typed a title and a couple of lines, and then blogger gives me this message, "unable to update at this time." and then i smack a palm to my forehead and say, "dang-bob, why do i keep opening up blogger in safari now that they're not playing nice together? welp, time to switch to chrome."

and in the process of closing safari and opening chrome, i have enough time to decide, "i think i kinda hate this post i was working on. in fact, maybe i'm glad blogger and safari conspired against me to not save it." then i made up my mind i'd write this post instead, starting 2025 off with a positive tone instead of the i've-got-a-case-of-the-blahs one i was thinking about.

then i sign into blogger on chrome and find out it actually did auto-save my crud-post, but now i've made up my mind that one sucks, and this one will be a lot better. delete, delete, delete, delete! sorry, crud-post, you're outta here!

so number one, i ditched that meh blog entry, and number two, my technology wasn't actually screwing me over all that much, and number three, now we've got this post, which is much better.

(please don't leave a comment saying, "yikes, this one sucks rocks, so i'd hate to see how bad that other one was." it won't crush my spirit or anything, because i feel like i'm on a roll now and i could tough through it. but it would be pretty annoying if i got a comment like that when i hardly ever get any comments anyway.)

and look how freakin' long this post is!

i'm totally ruling over 2025. this year's going to be the best.

xoxo,
claire