Happy Autumn

 It's the first day of autumn. I've never really gotten used to the seasons here in Georgia. I hoped that after being here a few years I'd adjust to it, but it still feels wrong. It's forecast to be in the 90s again today, although it will cool off by about 20 degrees later in the week. My brain clearly thinks it is summer, and the part that knows it isn't supposed to be is clearly offended. For years I lived where it wouldn't be unusual to have snow by the first weekend of October and the wrongness of 90 degrees in autumn has just never fully worn off.

The equinox just about marks three months now since I (finally) started taking medication for my "brain problems." We still don't know what caused the brain problems, but my neurology appointment is finally in the next three weeks, along with pulmonology and endocrinology. I think we're finally getting closer to an answer. Three months of actually sleeping does something magical to a human who hasn't properly slept for years.

I used to have this vague recollection that I was a different person. I knew that I must have had more energy, because I worked all day, cooked healthy meals three times a day, worked out, cleaned the house, and took care of a toddler. Over the last few years I was lucky if I managed to cook once and work a few hours a day at most. I couldn't remember things that I liked to eat or even some of the recipes that I'd made at least once a week for years in my 20s. Didn't know the names of bands that I liked, misplaced a lot of my belongings, forgot how to run my business, and in general just sort of fell apart. I knew it must have been different before, or was that just the passing of time adding sweetness to memory, and I was actually always a mess?

Recently I started remembering these things. I started listening to The Pretty Reckless again, cooking the turkey chili I'd made for years, and finding myself able to make business decisions again. I suddenly have so much energy for organizing and cleaning the house and now I have years of decluttering to catch up on compounded by inheriting the bulk of my grandparent's furniture and belongings.

I also remember a lot of other things that have left me a little perturbed. I really liked living in Montana. How did I even come up with the decision to move to Georgia? Okay, there were a lot of practical pros and cons at the time, and I do think that it put me in a position to buy property that appreciated enough for me to buy a nicer property in Montana. So I can't be too mad at myself for that. But I also really loved my friends and being able to go home to Washington for the weekend if I wanted to. How did I put all of that aside?

In hindsight now I think things were spinning out of control in 2015 and that's when it really started. By 2016 my cognitive issues had started to really cascade and I dismissed a lot of it as needing to have my thyroid medication adjusted and needing a change of scenery. I'm not mad that I moved to Georgia, though. I actually think being here meant that I had access to medical care I might not have ever received in Montana. And like I said, we were able to get a larger house, sell it for a profit, buy an even bigger house, and it looks like we might even be able to double our money on this house if the market holds out long enough.

Living in Georgia also gave me a better understanding of where my husband is from, and why he doesn't like it here (LOL), and it also meant that I got to meet some of his extended family. He has a really big family, though, and there are a lot of people I've still never met. I am also glad that I have experienced life in a place where you can garden year-round. It presents a lot more challenges than I realized it would and gives me a better appreciation for a garden season that lasts one season, ends with cooler weather and a canning frenzy, and gives you a whole season off. There are also so many bugs here, and they all want to eat my garden. I gave up on it this year.

That said we are swiftly coming up on my favorite time of year here. Autumn in Georgia is usually long, gloriously colorful, cool but not too cold, and often very misty, foggy, dark, and gloomy. And I love all of that.

If I have any complaints about living in the Pacific Northwest it's that spring and autumn are too short, if you get either at all. So many springs were snowy until they were blazing hot and dry, so many autumns cut short by an Indian summer that turned into winter overnight. I love those foggy leaf-crunchy autumn walks and the bird-chirping flower-blooming spring days the most. I like those transitional periods, the times between the main events, more than the main event.

Life is just one big transitional phase right now, and I can't wait to see what comes next.

The Cost of Art

 

Over the last few years artists and creatives of all types have watched with growing horror as generative AI has consumed everything we've ever made and begun spitting out mediocre facsimiles of our work. Very few people outside the art industry know what it's really like to be an artist. Let me break it down as quickly as I can:

• A lot of publishing rates have not changed much since the 1960s
• A lot of publishers take forever to pay and pay literally every other bill first before paying the artist
• There are virtually no protections for artists working as independent contractors
• As a self-employed artist taxes are higher and wages are usually much, much lower
• Many artists are making as little as 15,000 a year and pocketing almost nothing by the time they pay expenses and their tax bill. In fact, some married artists would be better off not working at all because of taxes.

Over and over we hear that if we give executives at the top millions of dollars in bonuses, it will trickle down. Meanwhile the people at the top still don't pay their fair share in taxes, and it's not a stretch to say that some self-employed artists (like yours truly) pay more in taxes than some billion-dollar corporations do.

Wage inequality is staggering in the United States, and artists are among the first to feel it. When average people don't have the money for luxuries, they stop buying art. Art, even inexpensive art, is a luxury for most people, and it's an easy thing to do without. A luxury car will still get you to work, and if forced to choose between a painting above the fireplace and a nice car in the garage, a lot of people will pick the car.

For decades now CEOs and other executives have been given enormous bonuses and gigantic salaries, and while we've waited for it to trickle down, they've come up with stuff like ChatGPT and MidJourney. Instead of letting that money trickle down to artists they funded a nightmare mimeograph machine. The upper class used to spend enough on art that it kept a lot of artists in nice homes and luxury of their own. Now hardly anyone can afford art and those that can would rather fund reproduction robots that are trained on the stolen labor of the artists who have been living on the scraps and crumbs offered by the publishing houses many of these rich CEOs own, or hold shares in.

I wonder when enough is enough? When will there be a new American Revolution that sees livable wages for all and the fair taxation of people with millions and billions of dollars? Why has our government let these people skate for so long, and why isn't the government doing something about generative AI? At nearly every campaign rally and televised interview or debate I hear Kamala Harris talking about how we have to be first in AI - does that also mean generative AI? Does anyone in the government even know how it works, or what the actual cost of art is?

Every day I see people bragging about the "cool" images they "made" with programs like MidJourney, but would they still think it was cool if they knew they were taking any of the crumbs offered to artists by this society?

Autumn Fancies and Faeries

 How has it been a week since my last post? Well, shit. There goes the "daily blog" idea.

In my defense I've just been really busy. I launched the 2025 Calendar Kickstarter and we started painting and repairing walls in our house in preparation of selling it. Right now my grandfather lives with us and is on hospice. He has pretty advanced dementia so moving while he's alive isn't an option because it would be too confusing for him, but we want to move as soon as we can.

The kittens have found the ladder to be very interesting indeed. It is their new favorite thing in the house I reckon. They spend all day going up one side and down the other, fighting over who sleeps at the top, and smacking each new cat that tries to join them.

There's a lot of things that go into moving, and with the enormous multi-state Highway 411 yard sale coming up I'm trying to round up everything we know at this stage that we don't want to keep and get it set aside for the yard sale. I don't live on Highway 411 but within sight of it, so hopefully people will venture my way and take some of my crap home with them.

After painting the front door I installed some privacy film on the sidelights. They cast rainbows across the front room/my studio for a brief period each morning. Today was the first time we saw it happen, and here are Notion (white kitten) and Quilt (clouded calico) on boxes of sorted junk checking out this weird new rainbow thing.

This week I'm working on a small set of watercolor paintings to take with me to Illuxcon next month in Reading Pennsylvania. They'll be available there, or you can reach out to Tatiana at TDArtGallery.com (she's my rep) to snag them before they go anywhere. I haven't scanned in the two I've finished yet, but they'll be posted in the next few days.

I'm also working on a few oil paintings that I've needed to finish for a while, and a sketch for what might be the last big painting I work on before Illuxcon. I'm not sure about that... but I don't want to jinx myself by over-promising, either. I do have to say that I've been on a low dose of nortriptyline, which is a tricyclic antidepressant that works as a nerve/neuropathy medication at low doses, for almost three months now. I have some kind of a brain injury (hopefully find out what that's about next month) and over the last four years or so (it's probably been going on longer than that to be fair) lost the ability to sleep properly, regulate my blood pressure, digest food properly, and various other "automatic" functions. Nortriptyline has given back most of them, and it seems to be getting better and better. The last two weeks have been the closest to what used to be a normal week for me before all of this started. So, while I don't want to say, "I'm going to finish a whole bunch of paintings before Illuxcon," I definitely feel like I MIGHT. And that's a huge improvement from, "paint? Well, how do I even start?"

Here's Velcro demonstrating what she does all day when she isn't pushing her sister off an 8' ladder, plus a little peek at one of the oil paintings I'm trying to get finished. And yes, my studio is FUBAR right now, thank you so much for noticing.

NaNoWriMo Becomes NaNoAIMo

 I have a really depressing ability to finally get into something right as it is about to decay, die, or be pushed out of the market by something new. I waited to join Instagram and by the time I got on board with that, it was over. Facebook had ruined it with algorithms and no one saw anything you posted anymore. It's been much the same with lots of other social medias, programs, and trends. I won't finally be sold on trying it until it's on its way out.

Last year was the first year I finally gave NaNoWriMo a try. I surprised myself by only needing about two weeks to get to the finish line, and then I took the rest of the month to ship art orders for Black Friday. I was so pumped about it I had plans by the end of the year to do NaNoWriMo again this year. I guess I should have spread that information far and wide among my circle of friends so that they would know NaNoWriMo was about to fade into obscurity or do something really stupid.

Somebody picked the "really stupid" path and put out this bull... I mean, this "statement" that they aren't against AI.

Let's take a second here, before we talk about anything else, and discuss that we are, in fact, talking about an event that exists with the sole purpose of getting you to 50k words - roughly a novel in a month (it's National-Novel-Writing-Month, after all, not National-AI-Prompting-Ten-Minutes-or-so).

How does "generating" a novel with the click of a button and minimal effort in just a few minutes fit into NATIONAL NOVEL WRITING MONTH?????????? This is literally the only purpose of NaNoWriMo. The entries aren't judged and a winner declared, the whole point is just to write a novel!

Okay, so now that we have the (should be) very obvious question out of the way...

WHY, WHY, WHY doesn't anyone UNDERSTAND that GENERATIVE AI and the ACCESSIBILITY AI that does things like read things aloud for people who have visual disabilities or talk-to-text for people who are deaf ARE DIFFERENT THINGS???

I am so tired of hearing that "disabled people need to make art too!" There is a guy called Pricasso that paints with his prick-asso. If you want to, you will find a way. When I was 11 I had back surgery and couldn't lift my arms for ages - I still perservered and look at me now! If I'd had a weiner I might have given that a try. Perhaps I'll still try using my breasts and call myself Tit-ian.

I digress.

Generative AI works by "scraping", aka stealing, hundreds of thousands and probably millions or billions of works of art, books, poems, blog entries, profile pictures and so on from everyone - disabled and able-bodied artists alike - and then blends them together like the world's worst Ninja into a pesto of nonsense and plagiarism. Who wouldn't like to buy a totally made-up mushroom foraging guide that will make you sick or possibly kill you? Why not read a romance novel that is going to sound like every other romance novel because it is actually made from every other romance novel?

Here, I asked ChatGPT to generate a summary for a romance novel about a time-traveling food processor and an agoraphobic bank clerk. This is what it gave me:

"In the quaint, modern-day town of Havenbrook, Claire Peterson is a reclusive bank clerk, trapped in her apartment due to her severe agoraphobia. Her world is a quiet routine of numbers and solitude, until an unexpected gift arrives—a vintage food processor she inherited from her grandmother. But this isn’t just any kitchen appliance; it’s a time-traveling device with a personality of its own.

When Claire accidentally activates the processor, she’s whisked back to the bustling Paris of the 1920s. Here, she meets Louis Dubois, a charming, disillusioned chef who’s struggling to restore his family's once-glorious restaurant. As Claire and Louis clash over culinary philosophies and personal insecurities, their connection grows deeper, transcending time and space.

Struggling to reconcile her present fears with the passionate, adventurous life she’s experiencing in the past, Claire finds herself torn between her safe, controlled existence and the thrilling unpredictability of her time-traveling romance. With each trip, she gains confidence, discovers hidden strengths, and begins to envision a future beyond her apartment walls.

As the lines between time periods blur, Claire and Louis must navigate their intertwined destinies and the obstacles that come with them. Their journey is a delicious blend of romance, self-discovery, and the timeless power of love. Will Claire find the courage to embrace the future she’s always dreamed of, or will she remain a prisoner of her own fears?"

It couldn't even follow the directions I gave it and managed to turn my whacky suggestion into just another grocery store paperback.

Offensive. 

Let's be serious for a minute (but only a minute). As a person with multiple disabilities I don't want to be given a winner's certificate because people feel bad for me. I don't need or want you to feel bad for me. I want things to be equal for me. For example, I want a ramp at the door so I can enter and browse the store myself, not a store employee to push me around the store and then let me have anything I want "on the house."

How is it ethical for anyone, able-bodied or otherwise, to use a tool that steals the work of disabled people? How is it ethical to then use that work for financial gains, literally getting yourself money from the work of people like Christy Brown, Laura Hillenbrand, or John Milton? Oh sure, it's not enough of their work to be recognizable but how is "getting away with plagiarism" the only standard that matters now?

Why don't people have higher standards than that? If you ask yourself, "is this ethical?" and the answer is "no", stop. Just quit right there.

Besides, how good will it feel to "win" NaNoWriMo by generating a whole novel? This is the same question I would ask of anyone who generated some "art" - how does that even feel like an accomplishment? You didn't do any of it, so it isn't even your accomplishment. You're collecting praise for something you didn't do. Of course it was only done by a stupid computer that can't feel jealousy or anger at you, but it still should feel bad because it is bad.

Duh.

The idea that this is somehow a fair accommodation for disability is bonkers. I don't want to claim credit for or profit off of the work of someone else because I have a collagen disorder. Yes, I am often really tired and sometimes everything including my fingers hurts, but I still don't want praise for that trite summary ChatGPT yacked up like a digital hairball, a sad amalgam of everything it had licked off the internet.

For eons disabled people have had to put up with being called lazy, dumb, and a lot of other things. I don't think we also need to be associated with theft of intellectual property.

Spackle and Mud

 I've spent most of this weekend trying to fix and paint one wall in my house, when I haven't been trying to get my son's homework situation under control. This house has one of the worst drywall jobs I've ever seen in my life. Loose tapes painted into place, tape lines, wrinkled tape, lots of superficial cracking, and not enough compound used in general. I've spent a lot of time this weekend discovering little flubs and f***-ups and dutifully repairing them the best I can before painting.

I'm only going to paint this one wall in the front room the same color as the room beyond. Typically this would be the living room and formal dining room, but I use them as my studio. I'll be putting a fresh coat of gallery white on the rest of the room. Please excuse the mess in the room beyond; for some reason the kittens love knocking over all the packing materials in that room on a daily basis. 

My initial plan was to hang everything back up when I got done, but it looks so crisp and fresh the way it is that I might just pack up everything I took down rather than put fresh nail holes in it.

I'm hoping to get done with this one wall today so I can resume working on Halloween art tomorrow. For now I've had to take a break because it's just so uncomfortable in here. I took the barometer off the wall, which I forgot we even had, and realized it said it was 81% humidity inside the house. Yuck.

I was really debating stenciling this wall since my husband said the blue would make it look dark in here, but I actually don't think it does, and I don't think I will stencil it after all. This color (In The Moment T18-15 by Behr) is such a nice color all by itself. If I was going to stay here I probably would, but for now I think I will just save this stencil for my next project house. This house is our third project house and hopefully four will be our last one - we've decided to build it ourselves so we're not endlessly repairing bad work.

I don't know why but I really love birch tree patterns. If I decided to stencil it I would use this stencil with gallery white to brighten up the room, but I don't think it needs it.

What do you think?