the coughing chorus

 it hasn't stopped. his fever went down a bit, but it's not staying down, and his cough doesn't seem to be getting better. emotionally, he's taking a stimulant that's heightening his emotional intensity, and combined with his usual truculent (my new favorite word) default it's been a really hard day.

this morning i helped ozdoc make her radio interview shareable (thanks, facebook, for making it nigh-impossible to share audio files), and i read a bit more of the fifth percy jackson novel.

at this point, i'm so disappointed by the writing quality nosedive that i'd put the book down if i didn't want to just get through it for closure. riordan thoroughly betrays percy's character in the underworld scenes, and rips the reader out of the world with silly gags, and it's now very clear to me why percy jackson never achieved harry potter-like status in the zeitgeist.

...

i don't know what it was specifically, but something triggered me this morning regarding the ai is slowly destroying your brain video; that "folie à deux" isn't just confined to AI and to individuals, but it's the exact same mechanism that's causing mass psychosis on a global scale: it started with search filter bubbles more than two decades ago, then evolved to ad-tech driven social media driving engagement by sowing division.

this explains why flat earthers are a thing, and antivaxxers are a thing, and how the political spectrum ceased to be a spectrum and everyone decided that anyone with opposing views is extreme, insane, and evil.

...

i packed my laptop into my bag, dressed for rain, and headed out to find a quiet corner to write in. i managed to get in more than two hours of focus time, churned out an article i'm proud of, and generated a video for it using notebooklm that i'm really happy with.

on my way home - in the pouring rain - i picked up a globe for mr smear. he seems happy with it, in spite of all the country names being in hebrew...

once home, i had a quick late-lunch and then hopped on a call with my lead, who's setting me up for a meeting with a potential client. so i've got some homework to do.

the rest of the evening was a mixed bag of chilling with mr smear (watching jujutsu kaisen) and enjoying dinner, and fighting over ridiculous shit. after he went to bed gd and i had it out, and we're both feeling pretty sensitive to the fact that we're now acutely retroactively aware of all of our missteps that brought us to mr smear's more toxic behavior.

it feels pretty awful.

anyway, i've spent the past couple of hours playing around with AI and watching things while mindlessly minesweeper-ing, and i'm about to balatro for a bit before bed and hope that by some miracle mr smear's cough settles and he gets some sleep.

not least because he's supposed to go to a manga-drawing workshop tomorrow which he was really excited about...