The Way Forward
It has been some time since my last post, and not much has changed, except the vision.
As it stands now, I sit with a book written by Alan Watts — rather it is called “The Book” — and I possess outlines for a number of stories that I aim to write. I will be self-publishing my work, at least the first one. The ways in which I’ve done things so far have not been met with what I’d call success, but I suddenly (and earnestly) don’t mind. Not yet anyway. In fact, I think I’ve mellowed quite a bit.
The book I am going to finish, well, it doesn’t have a name yet. It’s about the Metaverse, and it is fiction. It’s in the vein of Snow Crash and Ready Player One, if you needed some kind of comparable. I’m a hundred pages through the writing of it, the first draft, and in re-reading it, I wonder why I stopped. I have to tell you something: in the time that I’ve stopped, I’ve written a few short films, the outline of a feature, a few chapters of another novel, and another chapter of another novel. Not a waste. The way I explained it to myself is I’m a farmer, and I planted all of these seeds, and now I went through and spent some time watering them. Now I have to go back to the first, and really make it happen before I move on again.
I’ve stopped work on animating as well. Instead, I’ve just kept a notebook of projects and started to populate it with all of these things, so that way I don’t lose track. So much has made its way onto those pages, I’ll be busy for a lifetime or something like that. When I get back to it, I’ll animate my one-location feature film, just because. I have to put the skills to use, since I’ve spent so much time learning how to do it.
Also, I’ve found out about a really cool AI solution called Inworld. With it, you can program NPC’s with a knowledge base and an objective, and they will converse and interact with spontaneity and this organic quality. I can imagine the uses in storytelling, of not having to use a script, but instead a set of motivations and a foundation of knowledge.
As far as my uses of AI, I do use GPT-3 quite a bit. It’s great for outlining and building itineraries, and, to be honest, using it doesn’t make me feel weird. It is a great assistant and advisor. I do feel for those who are fully and immediately impacted by this rash of Machine Learning interfaces. I’m not completely unscathed, but I foresee more disruption very shortly.
I guess that means, if there’s some kind of wrap-up to this post, do you. That’s not super practical, right? It might be, for someone out there. Though we all live on the same planet, whoa do we all have different lives. Different perspectives. Different realities. So different.
On that note, I do want to say I feel for those who are going through tragedy right now. I have another blog post that I’m working on that will address this more fully. It’s titled “We Don’t Need Suffering For Perspective.” We do have a lot of suffering, and we will continue to suffer, but no, it isn’t here to be a source of perspective. Suffering, and other people’s suffering, it isn’t a white light for the privileged to sum up in a caption or a hashtag. It is a truth, and one we all face, and one we can’t make a stranger of. In fact, it’s one we shouldn’t make a stranger of, because it is as persistent as our familiar shadows.