This one is for Starhawk, who challenged me to make a list of things in my life that are good, against the backdrop of, well…
(I will get good enough at DaVinci Resolve to partially replace the audio on this with O Fortuna. Someday.)
Unfortunately, after racking my brain for over a week -during which my dishwasher “noped” out for the last time, Vermont has reached “that thing you said you’d do ‘when hell freezes over’? that means now” levels of cold, ICE murdered yet another person, and I’m currently glancing sidelong at my large stack of tax documents- I came up with exactly three things: My cats, being mostly healthy, and my mortgage payments going down for the second consecutive year.
Yeah. Long-term unemployment is really taking its toll on me.
INB4 the self-righteous and MAGA bootlickers: Yes, I’ve been putting in applications. Almost a thousand since last April. Resulting in a grand total of NINE interviews, including one at 11:30 today, over the phone. And if you voted for The Pedo Who Audibly Sharts During Press Conferences, you are to blame for me being in this position. If Sharty von Pedophile hadn’t won, DOGE wouldn’t have been formed, the federal workforce (which included me) wouldn’t have been decimated, and I -along with almost 300,000 people thrown out during the federal employee purges- would still be working. And to be clear, I was almost three and a half years into that job; Muskrat’s stupid RTO policies, and Russell “we want to put the bureaucrats in trauma” Vought deciding that support staff needed to go first is why I didn’t stay. You did this to me, indirect as it was, and I will go to my grave permanently pissed off at each and every one of you.
So, I decided to share a few things that have improved certain aspects of my life over the last nine months. Feel free to try them for yourself, and if you do, let me know how they turn out.
One: When baking, metric >>> imperial.
One of my favorite things to bake are chocolate chip cookies. They’re inexpensive, the dough comes together quickly, and you don’t usually have a ton of dishes to wash afterward. (With my dishwasher being out of commission, this is important to me.) But, for a long time, I kept having problems getting the dough to hold together, instead of being more like a batter. I changed flours (Aldi brand to King Arthur), I used less liquid, I tried chilling the dough, and nothing worked.
Until I decided to convert the recipe to metric and weigh out the flour. Since then, my cookies have come out perfectly each time.
I have a couple of theories for this. One, imperial measuring cups are wildly inconsistent in terms of weight. One cup of flour is supposed to weigh 120 grams, but I’ve had measuring cups that scoop anywhere between 100 grams and 150 grams. (I used the “scoop and shake” method, where you scoop up the flour into the cup and then shake it to level off.) And two, because baking requires exact measurements, and imperial measuring cups are so very inconsistent and inexact, you’re basically playing chicken with your baked goods, if all you’re using is imperial.
Ergo, for best results each time, get thee a digital kitchen scale (you can find them anywhere, and they’re about $10) and weigh out your flour. Keep in mind that 1 cup of flour = 120 grams, so if your recipe calls for 3 cups, you want to weigh out 360 grams. King Arthur Flour has a comprehensive conversion chart, so definitely bookmark that link, or print out the .pdf here. (Also, buy King Arthur Flour if you can; the company is entirely employee-owned.)
If you’re wondering, “should I switch to metric for cooking?” That’s up to you. Cooking isn’t nearly as exact a science as baking, and there’s way more room for error and correction. Like, put too much salt in your stroganoff? No big deal, just add more cream and cook it a little longer, to balance it out. (The potato trick doesn’t work, I’m sorry to tell you.) But if you add too much sugar to your cake batter, not only will your cake taste wrong, it won’t have the structural integrity that the correct amount will give it. That said, for things like meal prepping or weight loss, I do think metric is the better way to go. But again, this is a matter of personal preference, so you do you. Also, if you have and use a bread machine, use the measuring cups that came with it; those are designed to be precise to that machine.
Two: Recognize AI slop, using these easy tricks!
Writing is hard, and because of this, writers like to be paid fairly for their work. This rubs right up against the ethos of corporations, which is “get as much productivity for as little cost as possible,” meaning that most of them are turning to generative AI to write copy for them. Fortunately, while AI is slightly better at generating text than images, there are still surefire ways to spot AI writing.
Look at the structure of the text. Is it oddly symmetrical? Does it rely on a “not only X, but Y and Z” format more than seems natural? Does it use an unnecessary number of em-dashes? If the answer is yes, you have just identified AI writing. There are other red flags to look for -as the article points out, AI writing has a flat tone, makes weird and abrupt transitions, and relies on both generalities and fake references- but generally speaking, structure is the biggest thing you should be looking for.
As for AI-generated images and videos, look at the small details. AI cannot get human hands right. Now, to be fair, I have met wildly talented human artists who will not draw hands, just because they’re so complicated. Which makes sense: Look at your hands, right now. They’re detailed, right? Like, on my right hand alone, I have deep wrinkles on all of my knuckles, a ganglion cyst on my thumb knuckle, and a faint-but-visible blue vein between the joints of my middle and ring fingers, plus small scars and scratches from cats, past and present. But also, human hands are fairly small, especially compared to other great apes. Anything that small, with that much detail and that many moving parts, is hard to draw, and takes years of patient practice to make believable, never mind right. Don’t believe me? Next time you’re watching a hand-drawn cartoon with human characters, look at their hands. I promise you, they’re going to have minimal detailing and movement. (I mean, why do you think the Simpsons’ characters only have four fingers? …Apart from four fingers being less expensive to animate than five. Oh, and Fun Fact: God is the only recurring Simpsons character to have five fingers.)
So yeah, AI cannot recreate human hands. I’ve seen AI video where a “human” has three legs, or where their feet pull a Regan McNeil and somehow rotate 180°, apropos of nothing. I’ve seen AI generated videos where I’m supposed to buy a cute relationship between a baby and a cat, where the cat’s tail is held in a position no real cat would hold and the baby’s fingers bend back in a way that would have a real person, of any age, screaming in pain.
Also: What do the shadows look like? Do they match where the light source would naturally throw shadows? Is the video oddly compressed or blurry but claiming to be recent (i.e., if you saw it on YouTube, given its upload date, would you expect it to be in 4K or 240dp?). How does it sound? Do the details make sense? If not, it’s almost certainly AI slop. Protect thyself.
Three: Physical media over digital/streaming will help your attention span.
I’ve been making an effort to read more this year, and I’ve actually done pretty well. I finished two books in January, and I’m on track to finish at least three this month. I can’t say for certain it’s because those two books (The Paradise Snare and The Hutt Gambit by Ann C. Crispin, the first two of her Han Solo trilogy) were paperbacks, but I can’t say for certain that didn’t contribute to it.
I don’t think it’s any secret that I don’t trust the American government right now, and I really don’t trust Amazon, especially given the latter’s propensity for disappearing books off both their platform and peoples’ Kindles. (My favorite -for certain definitions of the word- instance of this happening? When Bezobub disappeared 1984 and Animal Farm off Kindles in 2009. So rarely does the world offer us a perfect example of “Orwellian”, that I simply have no choice but to stan.) I am dead sure that, if the six conservative injustices on the Supreme Court decide that appeasing their owners, the Heritage Foundation and Focus on the Family, is more important than the “originalism” they claim to love, they will decide that the First Amendment is bullshit and ban books at the federal level. If/When that happens, it will be of paramount importance for people to have physical copies of, at the very least, the most commonly challenged books.
This idea of media disappearing from streaming isn’t something new, either. Anyone who’s into lost media will know of MySpace losing 53 million songs in 2018 during a server migration, which might be the single biggest loss of media in recorded history. There’s also the case of Emo Girl Talk, the first podcast hosted by a teenager to receive corporate sponsorship, which was entirely lost when its host company shut down. And how many websites are currently threatened with complete loss, if not completely lost already? One of my favorite webstrips, The Jay Series, is on shaky ground with its server, and if it’s not backed up, I worry that it will be lost forever. (It’s been around since the very, very early 2000s, so yeah, not an unfounded fear to have.)
And sometimes, you just can’t get certain media on streaming. Fun fact about me: My favorite movie soundtrack is A Clockwork Orange. And that cannot be found on streaming media; Wendy Carlos is very protective of this album in particular, and she will issue DMCA take-down notices against people who post it online. Which… Yeah, she’s allowed, and it’s her baby; if she doesn’t want it on streaming, I guess that’s fine. But that does mean the only way to get the official soundtrack to this movie is to track down a physical copy: Vinyl (which I have), CD, or cassette. If you’re a fan of comedian and writer Dave Hill, you might know that he started out in a band called Sons of Elvis, and while you can find some of their songs on YouTube, their album Glo-dean is not available to stream anywhere, and I haven’t had any luck finding it through, um, less savory channels. //cough// So if I happen to stumble upon the CD, you bet your ass I’m buying it! Music is especially prone to becoming lost media, for many, many reasons, all of which lead me to believe that the only true way to preserve it is by getting your hands on as many physical albums as possible.
Four: Accept that there is no fast track to upskilling.
I have decided to take a leaf out of one of my favorite gamer’s book (littlesiha, a Just Dance streamer) and give myself a goal to learn at least one new skill this year. I haven’t decided what it is yet, but when I do, I’m sure I will throw myself into it and devote a lot of time, effort, and energy to it. Hopefully, it will be something that actually translates into “having an income again.”
People talk all the time about “upskilling,” but I think a lot of influencers, and even genuine experts, forget that skills, all of them, take effort, time, and energy to learn. Like, doing research in order to learn more. When people tell me they rely on AI to help them learn things, I die a little inside. AI is a terrible tool for learning, because it doesn’t know anything. It’s not even really a database. It’s a Large Language Model. It’s an algorithm, and not a particularly sophisticated one, either. It hallucinates “facts” all the time, and it gets wrong basic facts just as often, because it doesn’t have a native fact-checking ability, and it’s just relying on its database of words to algorithmically arrange them into something that resembles “information.” But it’s “information” like McDonald’s is “nutritious food.”
Example: I saw a really cute plant (I don’t remember what it was) at the store a couple of months ago, wanted to buy it, then remembered that I have two very curious cats who bite new things, and googled “is [this plant] toxic to cats”. Since I was at the store, I was using the Google app, and the AI summary said “No, [this plant] is not toxic to cats.” The very first response under it, from the ASPCA, stated that not only was the plant toxic to cats, it could be deadly. So you see, my hostility towards AI “convenience” probably saved my cats’ lives that day. And also, that’s not what I would call “convenience” at all; if I’d taken the AI summary at face value, and if I’d brought that plant home, and if either Smudge or Nyx (or, FSM forbid, both) had chewed on the plant, I might have had to spend a lot of money at the vet to either treat them for whatever poisoning they had, or to put them down if they were too sick to recover. That would not just have been a massive “inconvenience” to me, financially, it would have also been a huge emotional blow, especially knowing that it didn’t need to happen. This is why, even though I love lilies, I will never have them in my house or my gardens as long as I have cats, and as long as I know my neighbors have cats they let out: Lilies are deadly to cats, even if they so much as ingest a little bit of pollen.
Doing research is a skill. And like all skills, it takes time and effort and energy to learn to do properly. But the good news is, skills get easier the more you practice them. If you can beat a video game, you can learn to do just about anything. I mean, playing video games is a skill. It involves pattern recognition, muscle memory, critical thinking, and puzzle-solving. In my experience, most skills require all of those things, so again, if you can learn to play and beat a video game, there’s almost no limit to what you can learn, if you just put in the time and effort. Make it easier for yourself: Look up guides, ask people more experienced in that skill, use YouTube tutorials, but don’t expect to become an expert overnight, or even in a matter of days. And accept that you will fuck up along the way; failure is not shameful, and it’s not wrong, it’s part of the learning process. We learn because we fail, not in spite of it.
And… The first things you make when learning a new skill are going to suck. That’s just how learning goes. I didn’t start knitting sweaters flawlessly; I started with trivets and scarves. And for the record, the one sweater I’ve made so far has a neck so fucked up by my piss-poor technique for picking up stitches that it’s falling apart, and I don’t know if it can be fixed. But I learned a better way to pick up stitches, so when it comes time to knit the neck of my current sweater, I’ll make it correctly.
So… Do I get a sticker? “There Was An Attempt”, maybe?
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