Beloved Dead Knights

I've had an incredibly busy month - hopefully I'll get back into the swing of fandom again after this month. It's been such a long time since I managed to write anything, and that's bugging me. Writing has always been a hobby that provided a chance to relax and escape from stressors, while still keeping my brain engaged and active, and having gone so long without getting to write anything has really just left me in a position where I've been binging youtube videos and slept, and not much else. Mainly because I've had The Curse (Hayfever, allergies, etc) for the past two weeks, and that's not good for getting anything done.

However, my personal real life has been ticking along, and I'm on top of everything I should be on top of, so there's at least that. I was lucky enough to see the total eclipse at the beginning of the month, since I live just off the path of totality, and it was a gorgeous day where I was - clear blue skies, nice weather, cool breeze as I hiked back from where I'd parked to where I was planning to watch the event. Though it did take me an incredibly long time to drive home afterwards, and the number of people smoking did nothing to help my allergy flare up, I was super glad I went.

The point that I don't see getting made about AI enough is the requirement that these systems have on human labor - massive exploitation is needed to categorize and label the data which they scrape.

It's not a fully automated system, not yet. Which means that trying to poison the data set (for writing in particular) might not help as much as we'd hope - and also that the acquisition of tumblr as a data-set won't affect the output of writing AIs as we might expect.

It's not going an AI that uses the word blorbo every few words. It's going to be able to tonally replicate new types of internet dialects, and gauge human lexical patterns in ways which wouldn't have been possible before.

Wow the last month-and-change since I last posted here have been insane. I should have known they'd be a bit like that--because what finals season isn't at least a little off the walls-- but the storm that came right on its heels, and then the holidays, and then traveling...suffice to say I have been wildly busy and preoccupied for a while.

Which has had the unfortunate side effect of having less time for fandom stuff. I always find that I miss participating in fandom when I get too busy for it, writing is such an important creative outlet for me, and my stress relief routine suffers when I stop being creative. Considering I have some time before the next semester starts up, there's plenty of time to get caught up on all the fic I'd meant to write while I was busy.

Looking forward into the new year, I definitely want to broaden the number of fandoms I've dabbled in-- there's a lot of fandoms out there that I enjoy that I haven't tried writing fic for, and I've found that writing fic can be a great way to better engage with the source material. It helps me get my head around some of the narrative techniques a little better than just flat analysis. I also want to get better at writing slightly longer fic than my customary ~1k. Not that I don't like writing short fic, or reading it, but I just wish that I had more story stamina, and I think it'd be a good goal for the year to try and write more long fics than I have before. I need to figure out a good way to measure what that means, and how I can be kind to myself while still striving to hit that goal, but that's what I'm aiming for this year. Maybe joining some exchanges would be a good motivator to get those longer works out.

I'll probably update the "2023 plans" tag with more concrete fannish plans for the year as I get settled into the new year-- I'm still away from home, so even if I wanted to get a lot of planning done, I probably couldn't.

- Wondering if it would be a good idea to write up a personal general fandom exchange list so that I don't wind up accidentally forgetting likes/dws when I sign up for things-- I'd like to get more involved with fests and exchanges, though I don't have the writing stamina for full bangs yet. Maybe a mini-bang.

- Trying to write an intro post for this account, and it's going very slowly. I have no idea what to include.

- I should practice my art more, I want to get good enough that I'm more comfortable posting and sharing. I like the rough sketch I did of a Gawain yesterday, but I'm nervous to try and draw something else in case I go through another patch where I feel like I'm worse than before.

- Thinking about the best way to try and construct a place for Arthuriana fandom to gather. I feel like it's out there, poking around/scrolling the tags on various fan websites prove it, but I can't tell whether the relative inactivity is actually due to size, or simply being spread out over multiple different sites, or just a different method of engaging with canon.

Okay so there are a lot more thoughts where that came from so I should probably split this off into a different post.

As someone who never used livejournal in its heyday, posting here is confusing to me at best. I'm not really sure what I should be writing, or how I should be formatting things. I guess I'll just learn as I go?

Ultimately though, I find that I like the idea of placidly posting my thoughts into the void, so maybe I'll use this site more often if I just break the ice. I'm looking forward to just spilling my thoughts out into a place where I can find them later and not worrying about too many people seeing them.

Obviously I don't mind if people see them at all, or I wouldn't be posting on the internet, but there's a certain relief in knowing nobody follows me here and I can just say whatever I want.