I miss creating random posts where I share the odd jumble of things I’ve come across. So I’ll do that in this one.
Life Lessons Everyone Learns Too Late But Wish They Knew Earlier (YouTube)
These videos have been popping up in my feed lately, and some of them are actually pretty useful. After six years of healing, I was already familiar with the sunk cost fallacy, the ghosts of inaction, and the fact that my brain is a mass of paranoid tissue whose primary concern is keeping me alive—even when some of the habits it develops are actually detrimental to my being.
But the realization that no one was coming to save me was a stark reminder that I’ve been doing another kind of work all this time. I just didn’t know what to call it.
Once you ignore reality, You’ll get everything you want (YouTube)
Well, maybe not everything. I still won’t get my wish to fly without the aid of an airplane, but getting a life where I’m comfortable and happy is the next best thing.
I’ve been watching David Bayer’s material for probably over a month now, and it’s been just as transformative as the trauma-healing books that kickstarted my healing. At first, you might think he’s peddling The Secret-style manifestation and encouraging everyone to attend his exclusive workshops. Not quite, and yes, he’d probably like you to attend—especially if you’re a high-ticket client—but he’s not going to push it.
A lot of what Bayer talks about is mindset shifting, which is a crucial component of actually healing. Just knowing you have CPTSD won’t make it go away. Having information about how abuse changed you and altered the path of your life won’t, by itself, teach you how to live differently. In fact, you can keep collecting information, gaining insights, and analyzing your habits and patterns—but sometimes thinking isn’t progress.
You’re allowed to move with incomplete information. Information isn’t permission. Sometimes you get more information as you move along.
Moving along can mean shifting your mindset. Catching yourself in the middle of falling back into an old loop. Letting yourself feel bad while reminding yourself, “I can still do something productive while feeling bad.” Allowing yourself time to relax. Knowing when to kick yourself into action.
It’s a balancing act, and you’re not going to get it right the first time—or even the first handful of times. But getting started and learning along the way is better than staying still and wondering why things happened to you.
It’s like something I tell people when it comes to trauma healing: You’re not responsible for what happened to you, but you have every responsibility to yourself.
I Will Keep Using the Em Dash—Fuck You (Blog Posts)
Time for a tonal whiplash.
This is the first post of his that I’ve read, but I feel a kindred spirit in Daniel Miessler: Leave the Em Dash Alone.
I was the kind of kid who read all kinds of material. I read *The Hobbit* back in middle school in the ’90s and was roundly teased for it. I read books published in the 1950s. I read novelizations of popular movies. I read magazines for grownups. I scoured dictionaries. I found Patrick F. McManus’s outdoor adventure humor columns and took them into my heart at age 14. Through all of this, I picked up different writing styles, punctuation habits, and turns of phrase, eventually turning them into my own. And that process is still transforming.
As a graduate student, I’ve been exposed to academic writing: journal articles, blog posts, textbooks. Some of it contains a trace of human empathy. Some of it is stripped almost completely of opinion, emotion, and bias so that the core message gets across, leaving readers to form their own opinions based on their own emotions, biases, and whatnot.
In fact, reading a lot of AI-generated text makes me suspect that some of its stylistic weirdness comes from the kinds of formal writing it was trained on, which might explain some of its “soullessness.” But people are freaking out about it because, of course, they’ve probably never read an academic article. They probably aren’t aware that there is a cadre of specially trained, differently thinking people who write like this naturally, without the aid of a machine.
Yet there are fearmongers who seem to think that this mystical AI creature is somehow capable of creating something as arcane as an em dash. I can’t tell you how incredibly, breathtakingly stupid this is.
If you read any old text, especially something written before 2000, you’re going to find quite a bit of writing that includes em dashes. But it’s pretty telling that most people online haven’t read anything older than the recent bestsellers—or even many books at all.
I want to hope that people will eventually learn, from sources other than Reddit, TikTok, and their own ill-informed, fearful friends, that these things have always existed without machines. But it’s getting harder.
Aside from Miessler, I heartily enjoyed Brian Phillips’s own piece: Stop AI-Shaming Our Precious, Kindly Em Dashes—Please. Though, if I were to write it myself, I wouldn’t be so polite as to use “please”. I’d be a bit more honest and say something like: Stop AI-Shaming Our Versatile, Useful Em Dashes—You Paramecium-Brained Dolts.
AI Doesn’t Steal… But People Do (Substack)
It should only amuse me, not infuriate me, when people online paint AI as some mindless, wandering entity consuming everything and regurgitating half-formed ideas that lack the core of humanness.
But I have very little tolerance for sheer stupidity, a lack of curiosity, or even an absence of nuance these days.
You can make shit without the aid of a machine. You can copy someone without putting it through ChatGPT. Copycats have been forging masterpieces for centuries; there are fake Picassos, Rothkos, and Van Goghs taking up space in private collections all over the world. I still remember *How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life* by Kaavya Viswanathan, as well as the plagiarism controversy surrounding Cassandra Clare’s early writing and fanfiction. Viswanathan left the writing world in shame, while Clare is still enjoying a career writing YA fiction. There are respected professionals working in high-paying industries who have managed to craft original-sounding dissertations by cobbling together material from multiple sources. People have been lifting other people’s work for as long as people have been making things.
And yet, it seems that folks have forgotten the ability of humans to steal and copy. Somehow, we’ve decided that plagiarism and intellectual theft didn’t exist before the rise of AI.
In fact, I’ve dealt with someone stealing my work before. This happened back in the mid-2000s. A serial thief who had no concept of originality made a habit of stealing from me repeatedly. Just when I believed I’d heard the last of her, I heard from two people working in the animation industry that this same person had stolen some of my characters and nearly had them included in a cartoon pilot.
The only thing that saved my characters from legal ambiguity was that this person had cobbled together so many sources into her creation—Sailor Moon, Ed, Edd n Eddy, other anime, The Simpsons—that the storyboard professional reviewing her work told her that her idea would never fly.
She didn’t need AI to do that. Just a sense of revenge and connections in the animation industry.
All of this is why I enjoyed Diane Burley’s piece, AI Isn’t the Problem. People Are. Although I found the obligatory “you’re a human being and therefore special and your specialness is needed in the world” passages toward the end tiresome, the rest of the essay is worth a read.
(Seriously, what is with people trying to give pep talks? I fucking know I’m an imperfect human being and still doing good work. It’s all white noise to me by now.)