Catch-Up and A Little Rambling

Hello, all, and thank you for your patience with last week's lack of post. As explanation, my series of unfortunate events went like this:

• I logged in to blog as usual, but was having a rough week.

• The USB port I dedicate to my wired mouse is finicky if the plug isn't in just right, and I tugged on the curl of wire to free it from whatever was preventing it from moving freely.

• Somehow, doing so launched - and I mean launched an entire glass bottle of black calligrapher's ink from my desk, where it had been happily resting since I bought it to refill my fountain pen a few weeks ago

• It flew off the desk and evidently hit the wall, which shattered the plastic cap and poured a fountain of black ink down the base board.

• The bottle fell on its side and quickly emptied half of itself onto the floor of my bedroom (thankfully uncarpeted) until the level of ink was lower than the opening of the bottle.

• I leapt up to see the damage, and pushed the desk out of the way

• Doing so unbalanced the cup of watercolor water I'd been using earlier from the other side of the desk, spilling it across my desk itself and onto the floor, into a puddle of green liquid.

• I prioritized the ink but we were out of paper towels, so I sacrificed the only spare mop head we had and one of my two towels to getting the ink up as fast as possible. I do not exaggerate when I say the puddle was several millimeters deep

• I sacrificed half a box of tissues to scrub at drying spots of black, and hunt down the spatters of black ink on the wall, the floor, the desk, the chair, the innocent par of shoes that had been within the splash zone, and on the hanging cords of my headphones, mic, and power cable

• Once the ink was as much gone as it could be, I wiped up the paint water with a washcloth, rescued what papers I could tat had gotten wet, and hung my mouse pad over my bedroom trash can to dry.

• I was covered in ink from fingertips to halfway up my forearms and had a, ink-logged mop head and towel to contend with. Our shower is thankfully just an entire wet room, so I took everything ink stained - including myself - and washed them with hot water. I scrubbed at my arms as best I could and then also had to clean the shower from all the black ink water

• I gathered my things and returned to my room, where I hung the towel over a bag in case it dripped black water further, and put the mop head dangling into the small trashcan to hopefully dry before I could throw it out, since it was ruined.

• I went over the ink spill zone once more with a few more tissues and more squirts of a cleaner

• I moved the desk back

• I did NOT have a breakdown, ahem

• I logged back on to finish my blog post but realized my wedding ring wasn't on my finger. I'd taken it off to shower, and remembered grabbing it with my things afterward, but it hadn't made it back onto my hand. It wasn't where I keep my jewelry, nor in its occasional place next to my bed

• I searched for a good 20 minutes but to no avail

• I realized I had to sleep because it was well past 2am and I had class in the morning.

• I logged out of my computer and tapped out the explanation that the blog would be delayed via my phone from bed.

• Next day, went to class, still had ink stains on me, still couldn't find my ring.

• Came home, searched every nook and cranny of the room, eventually took every item out of my bedroom trash can - mostly ink-soaked tissues - and finally found the ring at the very bottom. I realized it had been in the hand I'd grabbed the mop head with and must have tangled in the mop's strands, going with it on its journey to the trash.

• Big Relief

• I logged back on to finish the post I'd begun the day before, and realized Wix didn't save my draft, and all the writing and all the images and all the captions and all the links I'd worked on were gone

• I gave up, haha

So, here we are, a week later, and I decided to just skip the post and return to my regular schedule this week. What a disaster that night was. Mostly I'm upset that I lost an entire bottle of new ink - half to the spill and the other half to a shattered lid and no way to preserve it. Nothing else was ruined, thankfully - you can see some faded grey if you look very closely on the wall, but my skin was dyed much more dramatically, and that of course simply faded with time. I will say I was extra tired and anxious the next day, worrying where the ring could possibly have gone, but once I found it, all was well. I just very much resent Wix. Generally my drafts are autosaved - to the extent I have had to delete multiple ghost drafts that exist only because I accidentally opened "new post" in two different tabs and never entered anything into one of them. I can't fully remember what the entirety of the blog post was, but I do remember the subject matter - and that it was good news:

I had my meeting with the Chamber of Commerce last week and registered my independent business with them! I'll be receiving a tax number and business identifier number come January sometime, and will be able to open shop and start selling! I'm not expecting to sell much right away, of course, but finally having the all-clear to do so will be a great relief.

I settled on a Dutch shop name referencing one of my favorite corvids: the rook, which I have rarely seen but which has always occupied a special place in my heart for its place in folktales and superstition. The Chamber employee who saw me had never heard of them, which surprised me, and we spent several minutes scrolling through pictures of them on his computer, which delighted me. When the paperwork is final and I have a site to go live, I'll share it here!

And speaking of sites, I'm looking to build a webshop of my own, and boy is it disheartening to see how fully site builders have embraced AI. I have expressed my dislike of Wix several times before, but logging in to write this today, after a week of discarding site options that rely on AI, boy was I struck with how pervasive it is here, on Wix. I'm against all generative AI, full stop. I have my reasons for mistrusting and disliking AI implementations on websites as well, and Wix has gotten really, really bad. Here's wat the new draft page looks like, before anything has been entered by me:

That is: AI highlighted blue at top right for the site's chat assistant. Those irritating little sparkles are everywhere these days, ready to route you to pages you've already read in your hunt for information.

"AI Tools" on the left column is for generating everything from the title to the post to the meta tags they assume I want. Using the word "create" next to this AI list is offensive.

Then, moving into the draft page itself, we have "Content AI," which invites me to punch in a prompt and have Wix do the rest, so I don't have to use my human brain or fingers at all, but simply click on a provided tone, like "funny."

Then we have the AI sparkle next to my cursor in the blog post itself, inviting me to click it to generate an entire blog post, tip to tail. Or I can ask for AI to change my tone, lengthen or shorten my post, or correct my grammar.

And, lastly, we have the popups at the base of the screen for the third time enticing me to once again just generate an entire blog post, as if the reason I blog is to push a button and subject my readers to generated garbage.

It is worth noting that though the popup goes away as I write, the hovering AI icon remains the entire time, always asking if I want to change my wording by typing in a prompt.

And though having five different buttons to access AI before I type one single letter of a blog post is annoying enough, each time I add an image, Wix helpfully supplies the option to generate an AI image rather than use one myself. Clicking on that button leads to a pop up asking for a prompt, and offering style suggestions, with the disclaimer that I should make sure I have the right to use an AI generated image on my blog - as if anyone has the right to use an image created by scraping millions' of artists' work against thei will and without their knowledge.

But I digress.

As soon as I settle on a hosting location and have a website of my own, I'll be migrating the blog. Personal reasons aside, from a professional perspective I do not trust that any web-hosting service offering generative AI is not also welcoming scrapers with open arms, or outright selling the images and data they host for training models. I'm assuming every word I write here is being filed away to be plagiarized and badly regurgitated in someone's poorly written essay down the line,

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And with that update and unanticipated mini-rant, I leave you again for a week! I ave my last class of the block tomorrow, and next week is only finals and that's the end of block two. We have some time off for the holidays, and then I'll be moving into an incredibly short final block of the semester, wherein I will only study one subject, and only for one month! I'm excited, though. We'll be learning sign language transcription, and though I hear the class is notoriously difficult, I'm looking forward to it. Even if it's as tough as it seems, I want to learn. Tackling a visual language with the tools developed for studying auditory ones is an amazing challenge, and I like how doing so reveals the flaws and shortcomings in those systems. I'm expecting to feel the same about transcription, but I suppose I'll find out in just a few weeks.

Until next week, I thank you all for tuning in again, and for continuing to read along. I hope you have a lovely week and get to do something you really enjoy!

Take care of yourselves and each other, and I"ll see you in the next one!

PS, here's a photo of a rook as an AI pallet cleanser, kudos of Kathy Büscher over on pixabay

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