[I took this photo when walking to the gym from work. One of the buildings attached to the Skywalk has a stairwell with windows facing west. The Skywalk connects to the building I work in, and runs from DeVos Place to the Van Andel Arena.]
It’s been another crazy week for work, leaving little time of brain space for creative endeavors. SO of course I have added a new creative endeavor to my schedule, explained under the Writing heading below.
Reading
I started the month reading The Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan, but almost immediately became distracted by Ernest Hemingways’s A Moveable Feast. So I am bouncing back and forth between the two.
Writing
I started a new daily (-ish) writing exercise based on the weekly writing prompts: Each day, as part of my journaling, I jot down a story idea or fragment from the prompt. It can be a single sentence or the entire story. The prompt generator is just too damn useful and fun for me to not keep it central to my writing practice. If I come up with anything worth sharing I will post it here.
Being a programmer, I often listen to music when I work. And when working I need music that is both interesting and not distracting So I listen to instrumental music, or music with minimal lyrics, or non-English-speaking singers. St Germain performs house-flavored nu jazz, which fits my requirements perfectly.
The Insecure Writer’s Support Group question for April 2024 is: How long have you been blogging? (Or on Facebook/Twitter/Instagram?) What do you like about it and how has it changed?
I built my first website in 1997. It had a tilde (~) in the URL, something like www.wmis.net/~jwinkelm. I used it to play around and learn just enough to get my first real web development job in 2000.
I started the first iteration of this blog in 1999, though the content thereof is lost in the mists of time. Once I had my own domain name, the contents became recoverable through the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive, and thus this blog has continuity back to August of 2000.
In the past 24+ years, Ecce Signum has gone through many changes.
The first few versions were created using static HTML and CSS, created locally on my hand-built desktop computer, and then uploaded via FTP to a directory at a web host, which I think was originally MissoulaWeb, which shortly thereafter became Modwest. Updates were intermittent, due to the many steps necessary to create a post, and also because of how easy it was to accidentally over-write existing content, rather than add to it.
The first version of my website which used content management was also hand-rolled. This version used PHP to generate HTML from hand-written XML files using an XSLT pre-processor. While not necessarily easier than using static HTML, it did allow me to create everything on the website rather than having to upload new files when I wanted to add a new post.
My career was just taking off at the time, so I was blogging frequently, mostly about web and game development topics. I also uploaded a great many Flash files and code examples, which just demonstrates the ephemeral nature of information technologies.
When I decided that what I wanted to do with my website was more complex than I had the time or energy to implement myself, I went looking for blogging software, and landed on TextPattern, a beautiful, simple software package created by the late Dean Allen. This change simplified my blogging practice to the point that I was making updates almost every day, and also created websites for friends using TextPattern, as well as creating a subdomain wherein I could post class notes and communicate with my students when I taught Intro to Web Design at Kendall College of Art and Design.
A few years later I decided that TextPattern was no longer sufficient for my needs, so I re-created this website in Drupal, hosted at the newly-created Drupal Gardens, a hosted service which had been inspired by the CSS Zen Garden, which was itself a huge influence on my career.
When Drupal Gardens closed down in 2016 it caught me by surprise, as I had my own website, as well as the websites for our martial arts class and others I had built for friends and their businesses which had to be migrated or rebuilt. This led me, finally, to WordPress, which is what I am still using today.
Here are some snapshots of previous versions of my site.
I mostly use my blog as an online journal. I post weekly updates about what I have been reading (lots!), what I have been writing (nothing!), and other interesting tidbits. When I have time and energy I post longer essays about various topics I find interesting. In that way, not much has changed in the 25 years I gave been running this blog. It’s where I post things which interest me, which I hope others will find interesting as well.
I have several social media accounts, but I am trying to dial back my presence thereon because, with few exceptions, social media platforms are a shitshow and a time sink and a place where creativity and attention spans go to die.
That being said, social media can be useful for marketing. When I publish new blog entries I will often make posts in my various social media accounts with links to those entries. I try to follow the principles of POSSE, which keeps my content in my own space and less subject to the whims of fascist billionaire manbabies like Musk and Zuckerberg.
If I had to make a distinction between the two, I would say that blogs are “this is me”, and social media is “look at me.”
Thank you for reading my blog. I hope you find it interesting.
After reading one gigantic book (Demons, Dostoevsky), and well over a dozen shorter books and journals, I have settled into a more sedate reading pace, with a few novels and nonfiction titles for this month. Feels like I have found my reading groove after a chaotic reading start to the reading year. Also, reading would be a good adjective modifier, like “fucking” or “smurfing.”
Nikole Hannah-Jones (creator), The 1619 Project [2024.03.23] – Purchased at Harmony Brewing Company in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Books and Mortar had a popup sale of banned books in the bar, and this one caught my eye. It had been on my radar for a while, and this seemed like a good opportunity to add it to the library.
[The above photo was taken on March 30, facing west out of one of the windows in the second-floor gymnasium of the West Michigan YWCA, at the beginning of tai chi class.]
This was the second week of a hellish two-week sprint at work which had me putting in hours like I have not done in years. But the work is in the bag for the moment, at least until the QA people get their hands on my code.
“Small Press Distribution Shuts Down” (Jim Milliot, Publishers Weekly) – I ordered many, many books from SPD back when I was the Special Orders Manager for Schuler Books, back in the 1990s before Amazon began to devour the world. And in the Caffeinated Press days we looked into distributing through them, but the press closed before we could build up a catalog large enough to need a distributor. The service they provided is sorely needed, and they will be sorely missed.
[I took this photo when walking home from work. The viewpoint is facing south down the connector from northbound Division Ave to Michigan Street, just west of the hospitals.]
We’re in the final stretch of the big project at work so I spent most of this week, well, working. Any time spent not-working was spent recovering from work. I suspect much of the rest of spring will be like this.
Reading
I finished Loaded, which was a good history of the Second Amendment, and its basis in, and magnification of, the built-in racist flavor of American culture. Now I’m reading a few shorter works, like last month, which is appropriate for my unfortunately limited time and attention availability right now. Right now I am working my way through “Bartleby, the Scrivener“, the short story by Herman Melville, in a collection of two(!) short stories published in 1995 as part of Penguin’s 60th anniversary collection “Penguin 60s”. Other than Moby-Dick, this is the only Melville I have read. I love it.
[The photo this week was taken from the fish ladder on the west side of the Sixth Street Bridge dam, facing east into the sunrise.]
This past Sunday, feeling exhausted and also nostalgic, I dusted off an old Lenovo ThinkPad 11e, fixed some issues it had with continually dropping its internet connection, and turned it into my retro gaming machine. I have scores of games purchased over the years from GOG.com, so I installed a few of them – Hammerwatch, Ultima IV, and others.
One of my favorite games from back in the 1980s was Telengard, a sort of graphic roguelike which I played A LOT on my Commodore 64. There are a few ports and remakes available now, but while I found a few that could be played online, I didn’t find any which I could successfully install on the ThinkPad. No big deal; there are ways to get around this, including porting the Commodore BASIC source code to Javascript and having it run in the browser. It wouldn’t take long; anything that could run on a C64 is miniscule compared to even the most rudimentary of games available now.
But my research turned up one interesting bit of trivia: Back in 2005 someone released an updated version of Telengard, which I had downloaded and played once upon a time. That person was Travis Baldree, who wrote the absolutely wonderful book Legends and Lattes. Baldree is one of the developers of Torchlight, also one of my favorite games, and one which I played A LOT back around 2012 – 2015.
Another week with little writing, though I do have a plan to start some deep worldbuilding for the rewrite of my 2022 NaNoWriMo project Cacophonous. Just too much noise in the world right now.
I’ve been a fan of John Zorn since I first heard his album The Gift while sitting in Common Ground Coffee House in the early 2000s. “Baphomet” is a single track and also an album, prog rock by way of avant-garde jazz, and a fantastic listen. I think the theme music for writing Cacophonous, when I finally get around to it, will be Zorn’s oeuvre, mixed and randomized and on heavy rotation.
Another super-busy week. The only time I had to myself was on the walk to and from work on Monday and Wednesday. That’s when I took this photo of the entrance to the Keeler building on Fountain Street.
Reading
I am close to done with Babel by R.F. Kuang, and loving every page of it.
February sprinted as much as January dragged. Now here in March maybe we can settle down into something resembling a predicable routine.
The Insecure Writer’s Support Group question for March 2024 is: Have you “played” with AI [sic] to write those nasty synopses, or do you refuse to go that route? How do you feel about AI’s [sic] impact on creative writing?
First, the answer to the first question: I haven’t written a synopsis in a very long time, and in the event I write another I will do it myself. I suppose one of the LLMs (e.g. ChatGPT) could be used (if not necessarily useful) but given the time I would undoubtedly need to spend fine-tuning the output, I might as well write the thing myself.
Now on to the second question.
In every case where the (creative, not business-related) output of an LLM has been compared to “real” writing, the output is inferior to text written by a human, unless the original text was also…not that great. Since the output of an LLM is not writing, as such, I will focus on the reaction of writers and the craft of writing, rather than the impact on the culture of creative writing.
As I stated in an earlier IWSG post, the biggest issue is the flooding of markets with the output of LLMs which (in an analog to Gresham’s Law), will inevitably drown out the work produced by real people. And if these machine-produced texts aren’t as good as that which can be produced by a human, that won’t matter to readers who settle for “good enough” when looking for reading material. And, frankly, that’s the majority of readers.
So the current, ongoing, and inevitable flooding of the marketplace with LLM-generated texts will have two major consequences.
First, writers will need to continually improve their craft in order to produce work which is notably more accomplished than that created by algorithms.
And second, the percentage of works which are human-created and genuinely good will continue to dwindle (even if their actual numbers increase) simply because LLMs can produce texts much (!) faster than humans can, and statistically, the number of genuinely good works produced by LLMs will increase (even as, again, the percentage decreases, as the artificial output continues to flood the marketplace), which puts additional pressure on human writers to (a) improve their skills, (b) increase their output, (c) make their writing voice uniquely their own, and (d) spend more time marketing themselves and their works in order to distinguish themselves from the mountain of scratchings extruded by stochastic parrots.
So the effect on creative writing will be that generated writing drowns out creative writing. Readers will be less able – to the extent that it matters to them – to distinguish between text which was written and text which was generated.
There are few easy ways to counter this trend. Such is the world we live in.
For authors the easiest is probably to create, build, and maintain real-world connections with other real people. Establish and strengthen your bona-fides by proving that you are a real person, and by interacting with other real people – readers, editors, publishers, fans, all of them. And this means having a presence outside of social media (which on the major platforms at this point is well over 50% bots and spam accounts). Even a personal blog is a big step in the right direction.
That’s the one thing LLMs, neural nets, and the other technologies can’t do: Impersonate us in the real world.
Life is still busy, leaving little time for relaxing and sinking into the state of mind where reading and writing is frictionless. Since the previous update we had a record-breaking warm day, then a sudden drop in temperature which broke the record for the largest 24-hour drop in temperature (50+ degrees F). The maple trees started budding a week ago, and spring peepers are making their little noises in the swamps, and mosquitoes are beginning to swarm around porch lights. And all this in February.
This reminds me somewhat of the previous Year of the Dragon in 2012, when the outside temperature reached almost 80° on St Patrick’s Day. That’s only a couple of weeks from now, and the odds of something like that are looking better every day.
I am attempting to re-start a writing exercise I practices before the COVID lockdowns – on those days I walk to work, pay attention to the small details of the world, and when I get to work, jot down five things which captured my attention. So far I have managed to do that exactly once. It’s been a busy year. But I am adjusting.
Subject: Fae, Artificial Intelligence
Setting: Ship
Genre: War
Listening
“Eyeball Kid” is on Tom Waits‘ 1999 album Mule Variations. I listened to this a lot when I worked at Cybernet Engineering, my first “real” web development job, and the second of several terrible web developments jobs. It’s a fantastic album and well worth a listen, particularly when laboring under a bout of existential angst.
I know you can’t speak,
I know you can’t sign;
So cry right here on the dotted line.
Now that I am no longer trapped under a volume of Dostoevsky I can resume my normal reading pace. In February I completed 16 books and journals. Sure, that sounds like a lot, but I purposefully picked the shorted unread books on my bookshelves. The combined word-count of these 16 books is probably less than a third of what I read in Dostoevsky’s Demons, which took almost two months to finish. And a lot of that was not because of the length of the book, but because it was Dostoevsky, and 1,000 words of Dostoevsky is, like, at least 1,500 words of anyone else.
A lot of these shorter works are graphic novels, or works in translations from works-in-translation publishers like Deep Vellum, And Other Stories, Open Letter Books, and Two Lines Press.
Wolfgang Hilbig (Isabel Fargo Cole, translator), The Tidings of the Trees [2024.02.01] – Well written and well-translated, but just couldn’t get into this one. Fortunately I have more Hilbig in my library so I can give him another chance.
Saladin Ahmed and Dave Acosta, Dragon [2024.02.01] – Fantastically written and beautifully-illustrated graphic novel. I will now need to seek out more of Ahmed’s comic writings.
Elizabeth A. Trembley, Look Again: A Memoir [2024.02.01] – An amazing memoir about how the stories we tell ourselves (and about ourselves) change over time, and with the telling.
Maurice Broaddus, Buffalo Soldiers [2024.02.15] – Excellent novella in the steampunk tradition. Truly enjoyable reading experience. My only complaint is that this wasn’t a full-size novel.
