Weekend Writing Practice

Today I’m practicing writing a blog post on a weekend morning. However, I don’t have much to talk about. It’s a rainy, cloudy morning and I just want to crawl back in bed.

It’s chemo cycle day 4 and I still feel pretty tired and unfocused. However, I have not (yet?) had any incidents of throwing up in the morning, which is a marked improvement. The new anti-nausea med I take before bed seems to be working.

My appetite is still gone, though. I’m mostly just nibbling on bits of food through the day. “Not eating enough to keep a bird alive,” as my mom used to say.

In other news, I finished the first Dungeon Crawler Carl book. If anyone out there hasn’t read it, be warned it doesn’t have an ending. (It was fairly obvious by the 50% mark it wouldn’t have an ending.) It just stops, and the reader is fully expected to buy the next book to continue the story. I, however, will not be doing that.

I’m surprised they’re doing a DCC live-action series. It should be a Rick and Morty-style cartoon.

I switched to the audiobook version of Dungeon Crawler Carl for some portions of the second half. I was expecting it to be better, but I didn’t care for it. The narrator sounded like a video game voice actor more than a storyteller. He was doing what I call the “generic male video game action voice” where they exhale loudly at the end of every phrase, which is a big turn-off to me. Maybe it was intentional, since it’s a book about a video game.

I had gotten a handful of audiobooks of award-winners or near-award-winners a couple weeks ago, since my credits were about to expire, so I turned to another audiobook.

I started an audiobook of The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez, read by Joel de la Feunte. The difference in prose style and audiobook performance is night and day. I don’t know if I’ll finish it, though. It’s beautifully written, but it drops you into the middle of a dense, unfamiliar world without much grounding. It reminds me of Dune, except Dune wasn’t that opaque.

Someone on the Blaugust Discord pulled out of the event because there was no rule banning AI-generated images. I don’t really know how to react to that.

I mean, I do know but it reminds me of trying to have a conversation with someone who is obstinately anti-abortion. It’s difficult to say something in a way that validates the opposing viewpoint while simultaneously undermining its credibility. For example, to me, grabbing stock imagery and grabbing AI-generated imagery is essentially the same shortcut.

For myself, I generally try to find a non-AI image for my posts first, because that’s by far the fastest way to find an image. But if I don’t happen to have something in my library that fits, that’s when I turn to the AI generator, which is the second-fastest method.

But I’m thinking about trying to refrain from using AI header images for Blaugust.

Ironically, using AI to assist. I asked Antigravity to give me the top 10 subjects of my posts over the last couple of years, and with that list, I’m going to see if I can find some non-AI images to cover those subjects.

Besides the fact that I don’t relish the idea of pissing off the radically anti-AI crowd, the big disadvantage of AI-generated blog header images is that they tend to all look the same: Bland, corporate, forgettable.

I even ordered some markers and paper to see if I can actually draw some line-artish nonsense to cover those top 10 subjects. I imagine that will turn out to be comically hopeless, because of two reasons: I only draw on paper maybe once every 10 years, and I’m still struggling with some loss of grip strength in my right hand, so holding a pen is surprisingly challenging.

My first idea to make non-AI images for Blaugust was to generate AI images and then hand-copy them onto paper with markers. I thought that would be a hilarious workaround. But I probably won’t do that. But then how could you tell?

Anyway, have a great weekend. I probably won’t write tomorrow morning.