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Expectations vs Reality, Writer-Style

April 17, 2023

So, you too want to “become a writer”, right? You’re in good company! You and another 5 billion people apparently want the same. But this, too, is a club where expectations and reality don’t quite match.

Inspiration for this post came when Alicia, a friend of the blog, shared with me a map that shows what is the dream job of people by location. As you have perhaps guessed it, people from Finland to Algeria and from India to Trinidad & Tobago answered that their dream job is writer. Other popular choices were “pilot” and “influencer” or “youtuber”.

As someone who has experience of… one and a half of those professions, I feel it’s important to talk a bit about the “expectations vs reality” factor of our choices.

The key takeaway here is, we are very often attracted to certain activities and we’d like to make money out of them. That we enjoy doing them is precisely the reason why we should never attempt to bring money into the picture – or, in any case, not so before we fully realize the repercussions of such an action.

expectations vs reality
“You are special, just like everybody else”
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Accidental Creativity: The Undead Muse

April 10, 2023

First things first: The Undead Muse is the title of my most recent music album that, like the rest of the music that I make, is an exploration of postrock and postmetal music. As the title of the album reveals, there are Gothic elements in there – Gothic fiction, that is; not Gothic metal! We’ll talk about all that too, but there is another focus in this post: what I term accidental creativity.

Many writers will likely relate to the concept of accidental creativity, and will immediately understand what I’m getting at. Still, here’s a quick definition: I use the term accidental creativity to refer to artistically creating something that isn’t what you intended.

We’ll need to further revise this – and include some philosophical speculation; for instance, is there anything but accidental creativity? And allow me this little indulgence of combining this with a presentation of this newest album, which I really enjoyed making and really enjoy listening to.

accidental creativity
Album art of The Undead Muse
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Let’s Make a JavaScript App with ChatGPT

April 3, 2023

You might remember a recent post on asking ChatGPT about the Gothic. I there mentioned how ChatGPT is a tool and, like every tool, its successful use depends on the user and scope. I also mentioned how, in my opinion, the most intriguing application of ChatGPT is as a programming helper. Well, that’s what I decided to try in this post: Let’s make a JavaScript app with ChatGPT!

Obviously, starting this mini project I had to establish certain methodological factors. That is, I had to decide on how to do certain things.

The main one was what the app would be about. For simplicity’s sake – both in terms of the confines of the post and the amount of effort I was willing to put in programmatically – I decided that the JavaScript app ChatGPT would make had to be a simple one. No need to create any full-fledged adventure game here.

I also had to decide whether I would only get help for this JavaScript app from ChatGPT, e.g. for certain functions, or I’d ask it to generate the code in its entirety. I quickly realized that, even if I’d have to do at least some of the mixing-and-matching, for the purposes of this experiment I should let ChatGPT to do most of the work.

As for what program to make, I thought the best idea would be to make something I’ve already made myself, for comparison. I opted for my Poem Shuffler. The results were very intriguing, to say the least!

JavaScript App ChatGPT
The image superimposed on the stock programming image represents a ZX Spectrum +2 – my very first computer. Younger audiences may not understand this is a computer, because of the tape recorder – hang on; do younger audiences know what that is? – which was used to read/write data. We’ve come a long, long way since 48k games.
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