I could kill Macbeth

hector's corpse is divinely protected so it can't be damaged by the greeks after death; all that effectively happens in the iliad is that his body gets dirty. but under normal circumstances (and i'm not gonna impose realism on mythology, but the iliad is famously detailed when it comes to bodily trauma), the physical reality of dragging a corpse along stony ground for miles would be severe disfigurement and dismemberment. first the skin would wear off, then soft tissues, then extremities would start to detach. i think the iliad's original audience would be aware of that as an intended outcome.

I admittedly don't have the energy to write specific scripts for this, but it may be worth contacting your legislators to either thank them or condemn them depending on their stances in these situations. I will provide tools to identify who voted in which way on different matters mentioned here, if anyone wishes to make such calls

It's important to celebrate victories where we can while keeping focused on the work we have to do. Especially when things happen all at once like the last week or so. Hang in there, y'all

Republicans who voted in favor of the War Powers Resolution:

Rand Paul of Kentucky

Lisa Murkowski of Alaska

Susan Collins of Maine

Josh Halwey of Missouri

Todd Young of Indiana

ACA Vote:

The vote to erect the January 6th plaque was unanimous in the Senate

I found this blog post about how ChatGPT can "enhance" journaling. The blog post itself was "co-written" by ChatGPT, and you can tell.

This is one of the most godawful pieces of writing I've ever run across in the wild; incredibly repetitive, rewording the same sentences over and over again and stacking them into interminable paragraphs of empty sludge. There is one "idea" in here, "I tell ChatGPT to ask me questions to help me reflect on myself, and I think that helps me to journal and think in new perspectives," and it is repeated in slightly different words like 50 times.

Expose a copy of Strunk & White's The Elements of Style to this slop and it'll start oozing blood from the pages like in a horror movie.

But the thing is, this guy wasn't always that bad of a writer. You see, I got to that blog post after reading this blog post from 4 years prior, which is about meditation and the difficulty in defining meditation in a way that can be operationalized for objective study, and it is much clearer, more structured, and actually contains ideas in it.

ChatGPT clearly made this guy's writing much, much worse, but he appears to believe that the opposite happened.

His problem isn't "being a bad writer," in fact, he didn't even write the whole thing, ChatGPT did some of it. His problem isn't exactly "inability to evaluate his own writing" either. You see, evaluating your own writing is about asking whether you communicated your ideas in the most effective way possible. This blog post certainly failed, because it argues that you should involve ChatGPT in your writing process while demonstrating very clearly that you should NOT do that. But that is deeper than failing to communicate effectively; that's failing to understand what ideas you have, why you have those ideas, and whether the ideas made it into the writing at all. Possibly, it's a failure to understand if you have ideas.

Is the problem the simple fact that he uses ChatGPT to help him come up with ideas? Potentially. ChatGPT does not contain ideas, it creates statistically plausible writing based upon a large body of data on how writing is constructed. If a person is or becomes susceptible to seeing "ideas" in ChatGPT's outputs, they might begin to have difficulty distinguishing between meaningful and non-meaningful writing. That is, they could lose the ability to tell what makes writing meaningful (as opposed to just technically formed into the shape of an idea)

But is everyone susceptible to that? What makes someone susceptible? Would someone have to have a weak sense of their own thoughts and ideas, or could a strong, accomplished writer that is skilled in expressing themselves fall apart with too much ChatGPT usage?

There are news articles about how ChatGPT encourages delusions of grandeur and feeds egos in an unhealthy fashion. It’s possible that ChatGPT fed this guy’s ego. There’s another options

Having used Jasper in a work setting two years ago (because my coworker and I were having to write a hundred articles a month each, our boss told us to use Jasper, and our clients were dissatisfied with everything else) it does feel like producing garbage. We were desperate. I’m so glad to not be in that position anymore.

If ChatGPT can cause people who are otherwise psychologically "normal" to lose the distinction between real and not-real, it's not hard to believe that any writer can lose the distinction between good writing and bad writing.

That being said, I think the reason that ChatGPT has its nails so embedded in so many people is that it sounds like a person and everybody is lonely. Humans are susceptible to attributing feelings and human attributes to non-living, non-thinking things. As it was once said, "humans will pack bond with anything."

waterlilies

People talk about how you can’t see stars in the city and yeah, that’s true, but their concept of “seeing stars” is being able to make out orion’s belt.

So, so few people have see the sky in all its glory and it’s not sad. It’s a fucking crime. Seeing a perfectly dark night, no clouds, not a hint of light pollution? That’s a fucking religious experience.

The sky the vast vast majority of us grew up with is not the sky that inspired us to look up. It is not the sky that inspired constellations. You can’t even see most constellations.

Your ancestors looked at the night sky and said “surely, that is where the gods must live.” And you might be lucky if you can see hardly more than a handful of stars.

When we were on a field trip to the middle of the red sea, I remember us all crowding at the end of the boat that didn’t have lights and just lying on our backs and staring

When you see a properly dark starscape

You understand why people wrote poems and made up legends and built rockets and said heaven’s in the sky

You think of the night sky like fairy lights on black velvet, but it’s not it’s not it’s like, like, dust in sunlight, like - I can’t find the words.

The stars are everywhere, like sugar, like glitter, like dust. You can’t find the constellations at first, not because you can’t recognise them, but because there’s so many stars you can’t pick out the familiar line of Orion’s belt. The North star has gone from bright familiarity to almost vanishing among a thousand, a hundred thousand, a million other lights. The milky way is a line of light arcing across the sky like a moon-trail on water only infinitely, infinitely bigger.

And for the first time in your life you’ll understand why people call it a dome, because it is, it’s three dimensional in exactly the way a city skyscape isn’t.

You’ll understand why Luthien Tinúviel danced under starlight, not moonlight, why people in a time before we knew the earth was round still looked up and wondered and built telescopes and dreamed about the stars.

The stars are endless and ancient and infinite and you will stand with your head craned back and your rucksack forgotten at your feet and you’ll feel like you’re falling upwards into that great bright sky like it’s calling you home and you’ll wonder how you ever thought the stars were beautiful before tonight when all you’d ever seen were the naked empty skyscapes of your home. And you’ll cry and you’ll spend the rest of your time there gazing up and wondering and imagining what it would be like to stand among those bright silver flecks

I’d often set an alarm to wake me in the middle of the night, so it was as dark as possible and my eyes as dark-adapted as they coud get, and starlight alone was enough to guide me

this post was inflicted upon me so now i’m inflicting it on all of you

This is an interesting thing. Looks like testimonies of people who left the MAGA movement- how they got into it and why.

Yes, actually.

Look, I know people want to react to the 'leopards eating faces party' with a big fat 'told you so,' but these are ex-cultists who are reaching out to people who may need an exit with a soft landing.

People who are deeply in a cult are afraid to leave it and MAGA is no exception! There's a fear that once you leave, you won't be accepted by anyone, so they stay even if they no longer believe in their rhetoric.

A very intelligent person can fall for a cult if they feel that it can offer them something they're missing. The outside world is perilous and you can be safe here. Your friends will reject you now that you've joined us, but we will accept you. Decisions are hard, we can make them for you. The secular world has broken you, we can give you new life through christ.

If you read some of the testimonies (and so many of them are young people) you'll see how much of it is 'I didn't see it, it took someone I love to show it to me, I can't unsee it now.' We've all done things we regret. Some regrets are bigger than others. I would rather forgive them and allow them to do good work than berate them for a decision they made when compromised by anxiety.

If you want to punish them, that's up to you.

People can change- we actually want them to change and wake up to what they were in the middle of. Don’t punish the actions & choices that you want to see from people.

You know how as a teen when you finally left your room & your parents made some comment about finally leaving your cave. Or now you decided to finally join us. And you felt rejected, angry, defiant & probably decided to spend even less time with them in the future? That’s the kind of thing you want to avoid inflicting on those who left that cult.

It’s very difficult to come face to face with something you did- that was harmful and take ownership of that.

If this triggers you a lot- you might want to collect some resources for leaving maga or cults. So if some family member or old friends comes to you for guidance or support- you don’t accidentally shame them back into the cult they tried to leave.

“てらす” (To shine) by Karin Hosono