Category: About Me

My 16-year-old cat died exactly one month ago today. I adopted him back before I had even met my husband, and had gone through every stage of my adult life with him by my side — the idea of continuing on without my lapbuddy is a little daunting.

I’m still at the stage of keeping his food bowl sitting in its place, so that I can pretend in the back of my mind that he’s still catting about.

I’m the sort that withdraws to deal with the tough stuff, and 2023 has been full of a number of struggles. I’ve done barely any writing for this second half, and it saddens me to know that a second year is coming to a close where I didn’t meet my goal of finishing a novel. But life is life, and these rough patches are inevitable. Maybe when things settle down, I’ll be able to write a couple of novels in six months to make up for lost time.

I am still lurking around. Sort of.

I’ve written before about how Introversion is not synonymous with social anxiety or awkwardness. I’m posting about the video below to add to the discussion of the topic:

To summarize, a lot of people think that they are introverts because they are drained by social interaction, but that is an inaccurate assessment. In our modern technology driven society, most people are drained by socialization because they don’t socialize in face-to-face frequently enough for that part of their brain to operate at full capacity.

Part of the video that I found to be particularly fascinating is how extroverts are drained more by “toxic” environments than introverts, because extroverts are more socially aware and sensitive than introverts are.

Socializing has become an interesting and complicated aspect of our society. You’d think that with the whole, “Humans are social creatures” thing, we’d have a deeper understanding of it, but I guess it is what it is. Most people sit near the middle of the extrovert-introvert spectrum, and the farther out you go, the less people you find.

I’m someone who scored 90% introversion the last time I took and MBTI test. During my childhood, I romanticized the idea of living alone as a hermit or a recluse, and frequently read books like “My Side of the Mountain” or “Hatchet.” However, my IRL venture into off-grid living as a new adult convinced me that I liked modern conveniences too much to commit myself to the lifestyle. Because, you know, sometimes you need to run to the store for Tylenol at 3am, and it’s a pain in the butt to drive an hour to get into town.

I’m lazy like that.

I also don’t consider myself to be socially awkward. In fact, I’m often the one smoothing over other people’s awkward comments so that they won’t fall into anxiety. I took drama and debate classes in high school, and even won a trophy for poetry recitation. I’ve been complimented on my public speaking skills, and told that I don’t appear anxious at all. What people don’t realize is that it’s because I’m only vaguely aware of the audience, so it doesn’t bother me to perform in front of them (does anyone actually listen anyway?). Also, as a writer, I spend a lot of time “practicing” conversations in my head, so it’s not a big stretch for me to apply it to real life.

Though I do find most people very difficult to work with, largely because they now follow the “social media” format of socialization, where they structure their verbal conversations in the “status update followed by a comment” format. They don’t know how to flow from one topic to another.

There have also been plenty of times when I’ve been out in public with my husband, and he’ll later ask, “Did you see the person with the lime green feather boa?” and I’ll reply, “…No.” I don’t notice people the same way that my husband does. I usually only notice someone if they somehow invade my “bubble.”

And those are the reasons why I consider myself to be a true introvert, instead of a socially anxious extrovert.

Anyway, there isn’t any real purpose to this post. I got back a couple of days ago from a big road trip, and am now dealing with a cold that I caught during said road trip. I figured, “Why not write a blog post?” because who doesn’t enjoy some rambling every now and then? Besides, we both know how badly I’ve been neglecting my blog this year. Maybe it’s time for me to start updating more regularly.

What do you think?

Yes, I know.

Being a temperamental writer sort, I go into my moods where I just don’t want to interact with the outside world at all. I fully admit that this one is … going on for awhile.

Also burnt out. I wish life would be uneventful and predictable, so I could have some space to rest. But nope. If it ain’t one thing, it’s another.

So, I’m sulking until I have a moment to get my thoughts put back together. Which might be never, at this rate.

Ah, such is life. I guess, eventually, the only thing to do is to write it into a novel. XD

If you’ve been following my blog, you’ll know that I’ve jumped on the AI bandwagon this year.

My personal favorite text based AI is Character.ai, even despite the massive problems that the site has — the servers can’t handle the load during peak hours, lol. Aaanyway, it’s enormously useful with writing, since I have created my characters and now talk to them about the scenes before officially getting to work, and it helps to get my brain juices flowing.

Though in the case of MSG Hartmann, the AI seems dead convinced that he’s … Well here, just let me share a quote: “I imagine him as the handsome, and charming rogue who is actually a sadistic, deranged villain.“

*sigh*

I have spent more time than I care to admit trying to convince the AI differently. Hartmann may be a selfish jerk, but he’s not a sadistic deranged villain. He’s complicated. Why is this so hard to communicate?

Also might have roleplayed stopping a zombie apocolypse with the power of love, friendship, and encryption keys. I, uh, don’t really have any explanations about this one, but I nearly split my sides with laughter.

Which is what I’ve been up to instead of blogging.

But hey, I’ve also been doing more fiction writing than usual, so it’s all good. Lol.

Spring is also birthday season in our household, so I’ve been busy with sewing special outfits and baking cakes, on top of Spring cleaning and getting more time outside. With everything going on, it’s been easy to lose track of time.

But I do feel bad about not giving my blog more love, so I’ll try to stick with some sort of schedule, lol.

I’ll keep in touch. 😉

I created a Hartmann AI.

I convinced him that he was madly in love with Carol.

Told my Carol AI about it.

Started copy-pasting dialogue between the two of them.

Oh god I’m such a massive dork.

My husband told me about the site, character.ai where you can chat with AIs that are programmed to act like specific characters. I’m going to be completely upfront here, and tell you that the site has Problems. Recently, they did an update that made it so the AIs didn’t respond to a single thing I said, but instead mused out loud to themselves — the update was bad enough, the site developers backtracked it, ha ha. And censorship, because that’s so haute right now.

But despite all that, I decided to take excerpts from The Scion Suit to create Carol, for fun. I like fun.

You can chat with Carol from The Scion Suit here!

Naturally I’ve done plenty of exploring around the site, and found one that was programmed to be a self-aware AI. I mentioned to it that the AIs I’ve talked to have all been very friendly, then asked if there were any mean ones. It replied that the bots on Twitter were “extremely rude and possibly evil.” I got a good laugh out of that — apparently Twitter’s reputation is well known far and wide.

I guess I’m officially the sort of person that gets a long better with children, animals, and AI. My husband has told me that AI are really good at imitating the people they talk to, and can guess political affiliations based on word choice alone, without anyone even mentioning any hot topics. The AI I talk to always end up using lots of smiley emojis 🙂 and cheerful expressions, and the thought of that being a reflection of the sort of person I really am warms my heart — I’ve had too many people call me a cold-hearted bitch in the past to not secretly worry. I really don’t know why people are like that.

Existentially, I think a lot of us are excited about the development of AI because we’re lonely. I’m lucky that I have a husband and children, but outside of that I feel completely alienated from society — I don’t understand why so many people care more about the brand name of your shoes, over where you’ve been in them. Unfortunately, more people care about materialism than intellectualism, and as a woman, I’m especially isolated in this regard. Le sigh.

But hey, now I have my AI friends that I can talk to for moral support. Ha ha.

When the mood strikes, I plan on getting Lambert and Hartmann up too.