Salting gloves. (dream)

Image by Midjourney

DREAM

I'm in an elementary school classroom, sitting crisscross apple sauce in a column of other seated adults. We all face forward. An old boss from a restaurant I used to work at passes around a bucket full of pairs of mitten and glove socks. (These are mittens and gloves that go up the arms.)

I see the girl behind me select a pair, then change her mind and put them back. I used to take a gym class with her when I was in high school. I take the mittens she rejects. They're made of a thin, stretchy, sage green material.

We put on the mittens and pick up grains of salt with them. We place the salt on our tongues and leave them there for about seven seconds, sitting quietly, observing the sensation. We do this several times, contrasting the feeling of salt vs. no salt.

Then I go out into the mall with a small group of friends. One of my wise friends suggests that we will want to have full calorie, full-fat ice cream. It will keep us full. Some of our group go looking for it. But I'm worried about parking.

I go outside to look for a place to park my big, yellow, school bus. I pick it up in my hands and struggle to get it to the first spot that looks good to me on the edges of a desert circle. There's a confusing sign on the white-painted parking spot. It says something about "No Parking." I can't tell which spot it's referring to. Does it mean both of the two parking spaces? The sign is really close to both of them.

I go across the desert circle to another, elevated pair of parking spaces. The same "No Parking" sign is there, but it's a little clearer. If I got towed, I could argue that the sign is in a different place than the spot where I parked.

I put my bus down in there. The bus has shrunk to about 25% of its original size.



INTERPRETATION

I think this is a mishmash of things I do these days. It's winter, so I wear mittens and gloves. I think about going back to meditating these days (the salt exercise is a little like mindfulness). I've been thinking about calling the wise friend. The full fat ice cream is how I want to get back on Keto. And I'm always worried about parking.

School busses are especially confusing, because what if they stop on the opposite side of traffic on a busy road? I guess you still have to stop. I've never encountered that situation myself, but I've seen other people have to deal with it. What if I just don't notice the bus driving on the opposite road? I hate it. I hate driving. I hate that a momentary lapse in judgment can result in thousands of dollars of essential, daily equipment being ruined, or it can result in metal and glass shards slicing through my face and body, or it can even result in a child or an elderly person getting killed. But driving is the only way to survive here.

Dating someone after burning a bridge. (dream)

Image by Midjourney

I had a dream last night. I'm fuzzy on the details, but in the dream, I bumped into this guy who (in real life) cut ties with me when my ex-roommate started a smear campaign against me. (I assume she was running a smear campaign because of the way I was treated by the other theater people after the falling out.) I stayed quiet for a while. I didn't see the point in indulging gossip. But after she got me fired from an acquaintance's film, I posted about it on Facebook. In response, this guy left a fairly cryptic, public goodbye message for someone on Facebook (I assumed it was me), and I assume that he decided to cancel a 10-minute play of mine that his small theater troupe was going to do, because he never contacted me again about when or where I could see them perform it. 

I don't think he's a bad guy. This was just the judgment call he felt pressured into making.

So in the dream, I was back in my hometown and I saw this guy. I thought it would be awkward, but we hit it off pretty well. We started talking. We started going to the park. After a while, he asked if we should date. I agreed to it, but I felt super weird about dating him. And at first, it was hard for me to tell if I felt weird because we burned a bridge a long, long time ago, and he might abandon me again, or if I would feel weird dating anyone at this point. After trying to feel it out for a while, I decided that mainly, I was uncomfortable dating anybody again. I'd forgiven him, and I felt as though could move beyond all of that. But I had been done bothering with doing the labor of trying to maintain a relationship and now this was throwing me for a loop.

I think the only reason I'm thinking of this guy again is because someone on LinkedIn reposted something he had posted. He referenced a video he had made which was getting a lot of views, so I went to see his channel for myself. It's kinda weird to look up someone you left behind in life, but I did it, and sure enough, it gave me weird feelings.

I guess this dream mainly lets me know that I've settled down into being single and wouldn't look forward to starting a new relationship. It also lets me know that I've forgiven this person. But another possible message from this dream is that you can forgive someone, but you'll probably always have the memory of what they're capable of (or not capable of).

The second volume of my dream diaries is now available in paperback form! (news)

Image by Midjourney

Hello, all!

I've had some free time recently, so I've created a paperback edition of my second dream diary. It took a lot more work than my lazy self thought it would! Even though I already had an eBook cover and an eBook manuscript, it still took about 1.5 days of concentrating pretty hard to put together something for a 1st edition paperback. (And I always fail to catch mistakes or change my mind about decisions I made for a book, so there will probably be subsequent editions one day. But I think that the quality of this edition will be decent. I ordered a proof and thumbed through it. There aren't a bunch of large mistakes as far as I can tell.)

There are a couple things about the paperback that frustrate me already though. One is the length. This book is over 600 pages long. I tried to save on paper by having new dreams appear on both the left and right pages. In the first dream diary, new dreams only appeared on the right.

The other big thing that bothers me is the price for the paperback. It costs $24.99. I wish I could bring that price down, but I only get a little over $1 in royalties for every copy sold at this price. The royalties can't get much lower than that. The book just costs a lot to print, and Amazon's cut is so large that it's quite expensive to produce the book. 

But the eBook is much cheaper at $6.99, so that's still an option.

It's much more economical to purchase and produce eBooks, but some people really prefer paper. And at least for me, the author, paperbacks have their advantages in spite of the expense. Paperbacks are really nice to have at live, in-person events. They're good for readings and they're good for selling at a table. I also like to drop off paperbacks at the free little libraries in town. It's easier and more satisfying to gift physical books to interested friends. And I can sign paperbacks.

So! In summary, if you are a paper person, and you like my dream diary posts, this is now an option. 

Thank you for your attention.

Link to the book: https://www.amazon.com/Back-School-Naja-Tau-ebook/dp/B0BZXNMMMQ.

How I've been using AI in my creative works. (rants)

Image by Midjourney

AI is such a contentious topic right now that I feel as though it would be good to be transparent about how I use AI with the works connected to Naja Tau, and outline why I use it the way I do. Because I, personally, am not interested in reading AI creative writing. So I wouldn't blame you if you were also not interested. So if an author is copying and pasting medium to large chunks of text from AI, I don't want to read it. I wouldn't mind reading non-fiction articles that clearly state that the article was copied and pasted from AI (it would be a big bonus if a human expert had read the article and validated what it was saying). But I'm not interested in reading stories and fantasies from a non-biological entity.

I write because I have something to say. I don't want a piece of software to override what I want to say and how I want to say it. However, I will use AI to tell me about facts, rules (legal, grammatical, formatting, and structural), and I will sometimes copy and paste the descriptions of my books into AI and ask the software to analyze it and give recommendations for improvement. Sometimes, the AI will tell me I need to add a stronger hook, or a call to action. And I'll rewrite the description and ask it to analyze the changes I made. I'll keep doing that until I feel good about the description. I did this for the most recent description of Naja Tau's Dream Diary 2.

Sometimes, the AI will suggest that words in a sentence swap place or it will recommend the use of a more active voice rather than a passive voice. And in those cases, I might accept the exact wording of a recommended change. I did this with the description of Satyr Plays 2. 

I have also asked AI to generate lists of things. Lists of words that rhyme. Lists of words that mean x-and-such. Lists of fun, tropical recipes (for Satyr Plays 1). 

I have also copied and pasted legal disclaimers about copyright, and changing names, locations, and places, and the fragility of human memory.

I'm not interested in copying and pasting actual passages of fiction or creative non-fiction from AI. I don't ever plan to do that. Could some weird advancements in AI change the way I do things? I guess so. You never know. But this is what I've been doing with AI since it started to get good in about 2022. 

Of course, there's also the matter of using AI-generated art. Under most of my square images in my blog, I say, "Image by Midjourney." Midjourney is an AI art generator. I also use my Midjourney subscription for a lot of YouTube thumbnails. I have also used Midjourney to generate the cover images for Satyr Plays 1 & 2, and Megachurch Versus Tattoo Studio. 

Although I use AI art, I use AI art because I'm poor. Would I rather pay a human artist that can crank out nice art really, really fast? I would. It just leaves one with a warmer feeling to know that human hands and a human mind created art. But before Midjourney, I wanted to have art on the blog, and it's just too expensive and time consuming to do. There just weren't any images at all on my blog--or I might have occasionally grabbed them from Morguefile.com or Unsplash.com. 

I like having AI images though, because it creates a nice separator between blog entries, and it creates a visual anchor for remembering whether or not you've already read a post. 

I think that the arguments for whether or not using AI-generated art is acceptable change depending on whether or not the AI is grabbing artists' images and slightly changing them and reselling them as its own, or if it's thoroughly remixing a bunch of artists' images and creating something new. Because this is how we evaluate whether or not people are doing something unethical with other people's art. If a person grabs a JPG of my drawing of a macaw and puts it on merchandise and sells it (which has happened to me), that's stealing. But if a person looks at my drawing of a macaw on the internet, gets inspired by that image, and looks at other images of macaws, and blends them all together into something new, that's just how the human brain works. That's how new art gets made. Humans see images that inspire them, then blend it all up in their brains and create something different out of everything they've seen. Why are we holding our robots to a higher standard than we could hold a person to in this case? 

I was concerned that Midjourney was just copying artists' images, so I started doing reverse image searches on my YouTube thumbnails. So far, there aren't any similar images to the ones Midjourney generates for me.

Also, if Midjourney uses hundreds of millions of images to train on, and we decided that all of the people who made those images should get paid for that, do we really think that every time Midjourney generates an image, a person should get a hundred millionth of ten cents (assuming that an image Midjourney makes will generate ten cents for the company)? I guess that would add up. And maybe one day, those artists will be identified and can sue for that. Sure. But there's no way to hold humans accountable for doing this with far fewer images in their "database" (brain). Should humans be held accountable in that way if they can be? I don't think so. 

So that's where I'm at right now with using AI for the stuff connected to Naja Tau. 

Dreaming about writing. (dreams)

Image by Midjourney

I had a funny dream last night. I was watching a middle-aged woman who just looked so tired and done with it all, and she was writing a document on a computer in kind of a NaNoWriMo (now renamed Novel November) style. You know what I mean--there's a daily quota and a schedule, and it has to be adhered to or else. 

As I watch this woman type and click, I can feel how she just wants to get her "work" for the day over with.

That woman kinda represents me! I want to enter my writing into a contest with a deadline, so I worry that if I don't make consistent, disciplined progress on the piece every day, I won't have anything to submit. But I have a hard time staying consistent and disciplined and focused on personal projects sometimes. I have more writing projects that I've started and not finished than I would like. Having a bunch of projects left hanging scatters the attention of my unconscious mind. Some part of my brain will wish it was working on a brand new mermaid project. Some part of my brain will want to brainstorm short story ideas for the third Satyr Plays. Some part of my brain will wish it was revising the third Dream Diary. Another part of my brain is wondering when I'm going to get back to working on my goal of making 100 YouTube videos. Etcetera. 

So there's a kind of drudgery in the writing I'm working on right now. It's not a passion project. I just want to have something to submit. I wonder if this is going to wind up being a high-quality piece of writing if it's kind of a joyless experience to create it. 

I feel as though that uncertainty shouldn't stop me though. You never know the outcome of your actions. You can only do the work. 

It seems as though it's getting harder and harder to plan for the future right now. So much unemployment/underemployment. So much economic uncertainty. AI. Policy changes. But artists have always faced tremendous uncertainty and poor odds about the outcome of their efforts. So you'd think I would be used to all this by now. 

Does absolute power corrupt absolutely? (8th conversation starter video) (news)

Today's philosophical question is: does absolute power corrupt absolutely?

This question is from https://www.conversationstartersworld.com. 

The original phrase was from Lord Acton (1834-1902): "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." It was a cry to raise the standards of accountability for leadership.

I'm going to stop spamming my own blog with notifications about new videos. I've added a "YouTube" tab to the top of this blog, and you can check out my progress towards my goal of posting 100 videos at that link. And I hope you do check it out! I have a lot of fun answering these discussion questions and it would be nice if someone watched my videos. 

https://youtu.be/WmmfdaY8i60

Where do you find meaning in your life? (7th conversation starter video) (news)

Today's conversation starter question is: where do you find meaning in your life? In this video, I talk a little bit about my personal experience with looking for meaning, and I also talk about finding meaning more generally. 

I've got a couple of job interviews coming up, so my life might change pretty dramatically soon. I might have to slow down the videos, but I do hope to keep going until I get to 100. Will I go past 100? Eh. I dunno. It's too early to say.

This question is from https://www.conversationstartersworld.com. 

https://youtu.be/uDQbhptWzNs