I think another part of it is an intuition about—how do I put this? Not wanting to commit fraud?—or not wanting to commit _obvious_ fraud. The reason I'm so glad that [there's a word for the thing](/2017/Feb/a-beacon-through-the-darkness-or-getting-it-right-the-first-time/) that isn't "crossdresser" or "transvestite" is because it's not about the clothes; it's about wanting to actually have the body of the other sex. The clothes are just a prop. And the prop ... _noticeably doesn't work_. I don't pass; I have _never_ passed. My voice is wrong; my skeleton is wrong; my movement is wrong; my face continues to be wrong despite makeup. At least at Fanime (where everyone _and her dog_ is in costume) there's no pretense that the pretense is anything more than that. If you fool someone—if only for a moment—then great, but if not, then at least you're not fooling anyone about whether you're fooling yourself.
-I'm probably just _bad_ at crossdressing/cosplay? I've never put the kind of _effort_ into, say, a makeup tutorial the way I do for my intellectual endeavors. My Fanime costume was authored by the Amazon product recommendation algorithm: after adding the pink wig to my shopping cart, [the "Discover Related Products" sidebar picked out](/images/discover_related_products.png) the hoop skirt and the Mr. Universe tee from Episode 48 ["Story for Steven"](https://steven-universe.fandom.com/wiki/Story_for_Steven). (The sword in the photo illustrating this post is borrowed from another cosplayer cropped out-of-frame.) And unless I become more skilled, I feel like I've hit diminishing returns on conventions—like whatever I was going to get out the experience, I would have gotten either this time or one of the last six (previously: [as Ens. Silvia Tilly at San Francisco Comic-Con 2018](/images/tilly_cosplay.png), as _Equestria Girls_ Twilight Sparkle at BABSCon 2018, [as Korra at San Francisco Comic-Con 2017](/2017/Oct/a-leaf-in-the-crosswind/), [as Pearl at FanimeCon 2017](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/05/gems-will-be-gems/), as [Lt. Jadzia Dax (circa 2369) at the _Star Trek_ 50 Year Mission Tour San Francisco 2016](/2016/Dec/joined/), [as Pearl as San Francsico Comic-Con 2016](/2016/Sep/is-there-affirmative-action-for-incompetent-crossplay/)).
+I'm probably just _bad_ at crossdressing/cosplay? I've never put the kind of _effort_ into, say, a makeup tutorial the way I do for my intellectual endeavors. My Fanime costume was authored by the Amazon product recommendation algorithm: after adding the pink wig to my shopping cart, [the "Discover Related Products" sidebar picked out](/images/discover_related_products.png) the hoop skirt and the Mr. Universe tee from Episode 48 ["Story for Steven"](https://steven-universe.fandom.com/wiki/Story_for_Steven). (The sword in the photo illustrating this post is borrowed from another cosplayer cropped out-of-frame.) And unless I become more skilled, I feel like I've hit diminishing returns on conventions—like whatever I was going to get out the experience, I would have gotten either this time or one of the last six (previously: [as Ens. Sylvia Tilly at San Francisco Comic-Con 2018](/images/tilly_cosplay.png), as _Equestria Girls_ Twilight Sparkle at BABSCon 2018, [as Korra at San Francisco Comic-Con 2017](/2017/Oct/a-leaf-in-the-crosswind/), [as Pearl at FanimeCon 2017](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/05/gems-will-be-gems/), as [Lt. Jadzia Dax (circa 2369) at the _Star Trek_ 50 Year Mission Tour San Francisco 2016](/2016/Dec/joined/), [as Pearl as San Francisco Comic-Con 2016](/2016/Sep/is-there-affirmative-action-for-incompetent-crossplay/)).
<a id="tech-conference"></a>As far as other special events go, I'm flying out to Portland—the real Portland—tonight for a tech conference, and to visit friend of the blog [Sophia](/author/sophia/). You'd think a few days of vacation should do me good—I've been an psychological wreck all year (I mean, even more than my average year) over having accidentally catalyzed a civil war in my local robot cult—except that the same cultural forces that have subtly-yet-fatally corrupted my beautiful robot cult, just _own_ the open-source tech scene outright, which is likely to present a source of additional stress. The spirit of bravery that sings, [_I will fight for the place where I'm free—for the world I was made in_](https://genius.com/16627280), must subsist in a brain wracked by constant emotional pain that—sometimes—is just tired of fighting.
It probably wouldn't have mattered either way, with so many messages flying by in the chat. In some ways, Blue Egregore is less like an ideology and more like a regular expression filter: you can get surprisingly far into discussing the actual substance of ideas as long as no one _says a bad word_ like "eugenics".
-—if we even have enough _time_ for things like embryo selection to help, if AI research somehow keeps plodding along [even as everything _else_ falls apart](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/05/antisingularity/). The [GPT-3 demos](https://www.gwern.net/GPT-3) have been tickling my neuroticism. Sure, it's "just" a language model, doing nothing more but predicting the next token of human-generated text. But [you can do a lot with language](https://bmk.sh/2020/08/17/Building-AGI-Using-Language-Models/). As _disgusted_ as I am with my robot cult as presently constituted, the _argument_ for why you should fear the coming robot apocalypse in which all will be consumed in a cloud of tiny molecular paperclips, still looks solid. But I had always thought of it as a long-term thing—this unspoken sense of, okay, we're probably all going to die, but that'll probably be in, like, 2060 or whatever. People freaking out about it coming _soon_-soon are probably just [following the gradient into](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yEjaj7PWacno5EvWa/every-cause-wants-to-be-a-cult) being [a doomsday cult](https://unstableontology.com/2019/07/11/the-ai-timelines-scam/). Now the threat, [and the uncertainty around it](https://intelligence.org/2017/10/13/fire-alarm/), feel more real—like maybe we'll all die in 2035 instead of 2060.
+<a id="if-we-even-have-enough-time"></a>—if we even have enough _time_ for things like embryo selection to help, if AI research somehow keeps plodding along [even as everything _else_ falls apart](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/05/antisingularity/). The [GPT-3 demos](https://www.gwern.net/GPT-3) have been tickling my neuroticism. Sure, it's "just" a language model, doing nothing more but predicting the next token of human-generated text. But [you can do a lot with language](https://bmk.sh/2020/08/17/Building-AGI-Using-Language-Models/). As _disgusted_ as I am with my robot cult as presently constituted, the _argument_ for why you should fear the coming robot apocalypse in which all will be consumed in a cloud of tiny molecular paperclips, still looks solid. But I had always thought of it as a long-term thing—this unspoken sense of, okay, we're probably all going to die, but that'll probably be in, like, 2060 or whatever. People freaking out about it coming _soon_-soon are probably just [following the gradient into](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yEjaj7PWacno5EvWa/every-cause-wants-to-be-a-cult) being [a doomsday cult](https://unstableontology.com/2019/07/11/the-ai-timelines-scam/). Now the threat, [and the uncertainty around it](https://intelligence.org/2017/10/13/fire-alarm/), feel more real—like maybe we'll all die in 2035 instead of 2060.
At some point, I should write a post on the causes and consequences of the psychological traits of fictional characters not matching the real-life distributions by demographic. [The new _Star Trek_ cartoon](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Star_Trek:_Lower_Decks) is not very good, but I'm obligated to enjoy it anyway out of brand loyalty. One of the main characters, Ens. Beckett Mariner, is [brash and boisterous and dominant](https://youtu.be/64obsPsXxkE?t=45)—[friendly, but in a way](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CVJGy0Do5I) that makes it clear that she's _on top_. If you've seen _Rick and Morty_, her relationship with Ens. Brad Boimler has the Rick and Morty dynamic, with Mariner as Rick. ([Series creator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_McMahan) Mike McMahan actually worked on _Rick and Morty_, so it likely _is_ the same dynamic, not just superficially, but generated by the same algorithm in McMahan's head.)
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff